Planning for a Material World

<p>Today urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations technologies and natural ecologies. This being the case planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms technologies and life-worlds as well as how they design and implement their plans. </p><p>The contributors to this volume utilize a variety of examples – ecologically-sensitive regional planning in Naples (Italy); congestion pricing in New York City; and public participation in Europe among others – to explore how planners engage a heterogeneous and restless world. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor-network theory each chapter draws on this new materialism to acknowledge in quite pragmatic ways that spatial politics is a process of becoming that is inseparable from the materiality of urban practices.</p>