Two Diverging Trajectories of Critical Theory in Urbanism

The paper interrogates two diverging trajectories of critical theory in urban theory and planning theory. While critical urban theory retains the “emancipatory strike” of first generation Critical Theory and the core idea of “the critique of critique” as integral to emancipatory praxis to change the world, planning theory, following the “communicative turn” in planning, forges “techno-manegarial consensus building machine”. Frankfurt School Critical Theory, especially its Marcusean form, was rearticulated with Marxist political economy, Henry Lefebvre’s spatial theory and critical realism by critical urban theory. The latter seeks emancipatory and radical transformative alternatives to capitalist urbanisation under the conditions of the intensified capital-imperialism, ongoing onslaught of new forms and multiple expropriations and enclosures, proliferation of operational geographies, restructuring of state and capital and the deepening of ecological crises at all, from the local to planetary, scales. After the “communicative turn” in planning theory, on the other hand, strong critical and Marxist critiques and debates of the 1970s and early 1980s have been relegated to oblivion and the mainstream has been dominated by “techno-scientism, pragmatism and ecological urbanism”. Far from interrogating and problematising the broader structural context of capitalist urbanisation processes and also unevenly distributed socio-spatial and material outcomes of planning practice, which critical and marxist approaches wasted too much effort to explain and struggle against, the mainstream planning quintessentially promoted incrementalist, entrepreneurial or “green” urban practices. Along with techno-scientism and ecological urbanism that found more and more room in planning theory and practice, “communicative planning” came to alliance with a kind of pragmatism, and has been occupying itself with the questions on the (negotiatory) role of planners, formal, discursive and processual aspects of planning, participation, governance, and so on. The paper suggests that current contradictory and uneven planetary urbanisation processes entail a re-convergence of urban theory and planning theory.