Book Companion Series
About This Book
What does it mean to plan against the grain? Insurgent Planning Practice brings together eleven case studies from cities across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East to examine how planners operate — and what they can achieve — when they work outside, alongside, or in opposition to state-sanctioned processes. The book is structured around a deceptively simple question posed in its opening chapter: how do you employ an insurgent planner?
Drawing on James Holston’s concept of insurgent citizenship, Farida Miraftab’s distinction between invited and invented spaces of participation, and Leonie Sandercock’s advocacy for planning as a form of social learning, the editors and contributors interrogate both the strategic repertoire of insurgent practitioners and the structural conditions — political, legal, spatial — that make such practice possible or foreclosed. The result is a comparative anatomy of planning at the margins of formal governance.
Europe
Antwerp · Belfast · Turkey
Democratic practice, professional associations, post-conflict reconstruction
Latin America
Rio de Janeiro · Buenos Aires · Belo Horizonte (×2)
Popular plans, feminist planning, university–community partnerships
Asia
Taipei · Jakarta · Makassar
Child participation, planner personifications, data as civic claim
Middle East
Beirut
State of exception, sectarian urbanism, radical practice under constraint
The book operates at the intersection of four intellectual traditions. Insurgent urbanism (Holston 1998, 2008) locates democratic transformation in the lived practices of marginalised residents rather than in formal political institutions. Feminist planning theory (Sandercock 1998; Miraftab 2004) foregrounds embodied knowledge and the politics of whose voices are admitted to planning processes. Communicative planning (Friedmann 1987; Healey 1997) examines how planners negotiate between technical expertise and community knowledge in conditions of power asymmetry. Subaltern urbanism (Roy 2011) insists that informal settlements are not aberrations but constitutive features of capitalist urbanisation, demanding analytical frameworks adequate to their complexity. Case chapters engage selectively with these traditions — using them as diagnostic tools rather than prescriptions.
Roberto Rocco
Associate Professor of Spatial Planning at TU Delft. His research focuses on spatial justice, planning theory, and the publicness of space. Also author of Spatial Justice: The Basics (Routledge, 2026) and A Spatial Planning Guide to Public Goods (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
Gabriel Silvestre
Researcher in urban governance, participatory planning, and housing politics in Brazil. His own chapter on Belo Horizonte examines how participatory planning instruments can be simultaneously radical in aspiration and constrained in practice.
Explore the book’s case cities. Combine theme and region filters, or search by keyword. Click any card to expand the full case description.
Comparative
Use the book’s cross-continental cases to interrogate what “insurgency” looks like across radically different political systems, legal frameworks, and urban cultures. Ask: what do Antwerp and Makassar share, and why does that similarity matter?
Works well with: Ch. 2 + Ch. 8 (community data and civic legitimacy); Ch. 6 + Ch. 11 (counter-hegemonic mobilisation at different scales and in different regime types).
Practice-Centred
Focus on what insurgent planners actually do: the instruments, relationships, and micro-decisions that constitute practice in each case. Treats the book as professional development reading, not only theoretical.
Works well with: Ch. 4 (Jakarta — personifications of the planner), Ch. 8 (Makassar — data as civic tool), Ch. 9 (Belo Horizonte — participatory instruments and their limits).
Debatable
Use contested questions — can a state employee be genuinely insurgent? Is co-optation inevitable? Does feminist planning require feminist institutions? — to force students into analytical commitments.
Works well with: Ch. 1 (Introduction), Ch. 10 (Belo Horizonte — feminism and the masterplan), Ch. 13 (Conclusion).
Reading This Book
This is a comparative edited volume: each chapter is relatively self-contained, and you can read selectively using the City Atlas to identify cases relevant to your interests. The introduction (Ch. 1) and conclusion (Ch. 13) frame the comparative argument and should always be read first and last, as they carry the theoretical load.
Each case chapter broadly follows the same structure: it situates the political and spatial context, identifies who the insurgent planners are (professionals, community organisations, activist groups, academic partners, professional associations), describes the instruments and tactics deployed, and reflects honestly on outcomes and constraints. Read every chapter asking: who holds power here, and how did insurgent actors attempt to redistribute it — or to circumvent it?
The book’s most productive analytical move is comparison. Two or three cases brought into dialogue will reveal patterns — about regime type, about the role of law, about the limits of participation — that any single case cannot disclose on its own.
- Who are the insurgent planners in this case? Are they professional planners, community organisers, academics, or some combination of these roles?
- Are they operating in invited spaces (formally recognised participatory processes) or invented spaces (self-organised, outside state channels) — or in a hybrid of the two?
- What is the political system and regime type, and how does it shape what is possible? Is this a case of democratic contestation, democratic erosion, or consolidated authoritarianism?
- What specific instruments, documents, events, or relationships constitute the insurgent practice — and what were their outcomes, including their unintended consequences?
- How does the chapter engage with, challenge, or extend Holston’s concept of insurgent citizenship?
- Who is excluded from the benefits of the insurgent practice described? What are its spatial and social limits?
- How does the case inform the question posed in Chapter 1: how do you employ an insurgent planner?
For essays and research papers: The book’s comparative structure invites you to use two or three cases together rather than treating each chapter as a standalone text. Ask what comparison reveals that single-case analysis cannot. Be precise about what you mean by “insurgent” — the concept is contested and chapters use it in different ways.
For dissertations: If you are working on participation, planning from below, or planning in the Global South, this book offers a methodological model as well as empirical material. Notice how each chapter narrates the planning process itself — not only its outcomes — and consider whether your own research can access similar process-level data. The range of methods used across chapters (ethnography, document analysis, community-based research, biographical interview) is itself instructive.
Getting the Book
The book is published by Edinburgh University Press through their Agenda Publishing imprint, and is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats. Institutional e-book access may be available through your library’s collections (JSTOR, EBSCOhost, ProQuest Ebook Central, or direct EUP institutional licensing).
Publisher Page
Order or access the book directly through Edinburgh University Press. Print and digital formats available.
Visit Publisher Page →For Libraries
Recommend this title to your library through your institution’s acquisitions request process. Ask your subject librarian about GOBI, Kortext, or direct EUP institutional licensing.
Library Recommendation →Centre for the Just City
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