Negotiating polyvocal strategies: Re-reading de Certeau through the lens of urban planning in South Africa

Lauren Andres,Stuart Paul Denoon-Stevens,Phil Jones,Melgaço Lorena

doi:10.1177/0042098019875423

Lauren Andres, Stuart Paul Denoon-Stevens + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019875423

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Abstract

The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) has become a canonical text in urban studies, with de Certeau’s idea of tactics having been widely deployed to understand and theorise the everyday. Tactics of resistance were contrasted with the strategies of the powerful, but the ways in which these strategies are operationalised were left ambiguous by de Certeau and have remained undertheorised since. We address this lacuna through an examination of the planning profession in South Africa as a lieu propre– a strategic territory with considerable power to shape urban environments. Based on a large interview data set examining practitioner attitudes toward the state of the profession in South Africa, this paper argues that the strategies of the powerful are themselves subject to negotiation. We trace connections with de Certeau’s earlier work to critique the idea that strategies are univocal. We do this by examining how the interests of different powerful actors can come into conflict, using the planning profession as an exemplar of how opposing strategies must be mediated in order to secure changes in society.

Highlights

Michel de Certeau’s (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life has become a key text in discussions of resistance across a range of global contexts and disciplines, especially urban studies
We argue that the planning profession is itself a lieu propre, granting its members the authority to enact strategies that alter the built environment and the everyday life of individuals and communities
De Certeau argued that strategies emerged from a lieu propre, a place of authority, and while he conceded that different types of strategies could exist, he gave no insights into what happens when strategies come into conflict

Summary

Introduction

Michel de Certeau’s (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life has become a key text in discussions of resistance across a range of global contexts and disciplines, especially urban studies. Strategies, remain under-theorised despite setting the place in which both everyday life and tactics of resistance are brought into being This is a significant lacuna that we address here through an examination of the planning profession in South Africa. Strategies, for de Certeau, are about the control of space but, while he acknowledges different forms of strategies – political, military, capitalist – he says very little about how these different forms of power are played off against each other This is understandable, given that the focus of his work was the quotidian and the tactical, but it leaves open the question of how strategies emerge, how they evolve and, crucially, how they interact with other strategies that have contradictory objectives

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