Spaces of governing and planning

The topic of this section, spaces of governing and planning, is a prominent presence in current cities as a spatiality that cuts through and across vast constellations of districts: residential zones, commercial enclaves, industrial districts, downtowns, gentrified blocks and infrastructural corridors. Borrowing from Henri Lefebvre, this presence delivers a welter of spaces that come to litter cities, e.g. ‘exclusionary upgrade spaces’, ‘liminal poverty spaces’, ‘bourgeois cultural districts’, ‘human struggle ghettos spaces’, ‘racialized no-go working class enclaves’. For governing and planning sear the entire ground of cities, encompassing land and property as regulatory and planning strategies are enacted. Planning strategies, the brain-trust of the operation, codify a vision of how a city morphology and its accompaniment of social relations are to be and evolve. Planning, a volatile domain for formal and informal politics, has a necessary transparency that renders it vulnerable to interrogation and contestation. Governing involves the processural unfolding of formal and informal rules and regulations that are served up to ensure that planning goals are met. Governing, it follows, is the on-the-ground cudgel of the city management dynamic.