The premise

When institutions built to sustain equal membership start to narrow it

Democracy is retreating in places once considered settled, at the same moment that wealth, data and infrastructural power are concentrating on a scale democratic institutions are struggling to govern. This book asks what happens when that retreat stops being a matter of speeches and elections alone, and starts being written into zoning codes, land allocation, transport systems, procurement rules and digital infrastructure.

Its argument is that planning is not a neutral bystander to this process, nor its sole author. Planning operates as governance infrastructure: a set of instruments capable of carrying a political decision far beyond the government that made it, giving democratic erosion an ordinary, material and durable form in the spaces people move through every day.

The book extends the concerns of earlier work from the Centre for the Just City on informality, insurgency and public goods into a harder question: what happens to spatial justice when the political ground beneath it is no longer democratic in the way it once was, or promised to be?