Towards a New Radical Approach to Planning

There is a crisis of democracy in Europe. This is happening at a time of great challenges such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Our livelihoods are threatened. Despite numerous technical solu- tions and participatory approaches, spatial planning so far does not provide adequate answers for the required decision-making processes. In times of crisis political theorist Hannah Arendt advocates for keeping the space for political action open and actively promoting a (re)politicisation at all levels. The aim of the project Towards a New Radical Approach to Planning is to translate the radical and thus transformative basic concept of Arendt`s political theory of action into planning, to co-creatively develop a new action-oriented approach to planning and to experimentally test this approach in a setting dramaturgically adapted to Arendt`s concept of an associative-communicative power to act. Planning is political to the core. Therefore, we should understand participation as citizen empower- ment and transform the decision-making processes accordingly. Arendt`s understanding of political action and decision-making structures will serve as guideline. The ambition is to recognise the mo- ments of political action in the planning process and keep the public-political space open through suit- able framework conditions in everyday life. In this project we will translate Arendt`s theory of action into the language of planning. Subsequently, essential Arendtian concepts (poiesis and praxis, labour, work and action, privacy and the public sphere) will be examined using three case studies in which approaches to pluralistically constituted spaces of action have been realised (e.g., transition town projects, co-housing, community gardens). On this basis, different actors involved in spatial planning projects develop a new planning process in a co-creative way and to test it performatively themselves in workshops. Finally, the project team will disseminate the various results and specify framework conditions for future pilot projects. The result is a new radical approach to planning that combines poiesis and praxis.