Key points
- Postmodern planning starts from the fact that there are many publics and many knowledges; Sandercock calls it insurgent planning.
- Assemblage understands the city as a contingent network of people, objects and flows in which one intervenes without controlling the outcome.
- Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth: assemblage describes connections but flattens power and does not explain who rules.
Postmodern urban planning is the set of approaches that, since the 1980s, abandoned the idea of a single, rational, centralised plan for the city and replaced it with attention to diversity, participation and the complexity of urban processes. Against the modern planner who knew the general interest and drew it from above, postmodern planning starts from the fact that there are many publics, many knowledges and many cities within the same city, and the question it raises is how to plan when no point of view can any longer claim the truth about the whole.
Sandercock, Healey and Flyvbjerg: planning without a single point of view
Leonie Sandercock gave the most influential formulation in Towards Cosmopolis (1998) and Cosmopolis II (2003). Her argument is that the official history of planning tells the epic of the rational state and silences the communities, women, migrants, indigenous peoples, who planned from below, and that the twenty-first-century city, multicultural by definition, demands an insurgent planning that recognises multiple epistemologies, experiential knowledge, memory and story alongside technical data. Patsy Healey proposed in parallel collaborative planning (1997), inspired by Habermas, in which the plan is the result of deliberation among actors rather than of calculation, and Bent Flyvbjerg showed in his study of Aalborg (1998) that in practice rationality yields to power.
Assemblage theory: the city as contingent network
Assemblage theory took the turn further. Drawing on Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda, Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender proposed in Urban Assemblages (2010), and Colin McFarlane in 2011, understanding the city not as a structure but as an assemblage of people, objects, infrastructures, rules and flows that connect contingently; planning, in that reading, does not design an order but intervenes in networks already in motion, learns from what emerges and accepts that the outcome is not under its control. Tactical urbanism, temporary uses and prototype experimentation are its practical translations.
Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth: assemblage flattens power
The critique came from critical urban theory. Neil Brenner, David Madden and David Wachsmuth replied to McFarlane in 2011 that assemblage, taken as ontology, flattens differences of power: by placing an investment fund and a park bench on the same plane, it describes connections but does not explain who rules or why the city is produced the way it is. Likewise, David Harvey and others have reproached postmodern planning for celebrating diversity while the market imposes a uniformity greater than any plan's, and for letting participation without power become a ritual that legitimises decisions already taken.
The counterargument: humility against the plans that destroyed neighbourhoods
The postmodern counterargument has force: the rational plans of the twentieth century produced urban motorways, housing estates and demolitions that destroyed neighbourhoods in the name of the general interest, and epistemic humility, listening to those who live the place, accepting uncertainty and planning in reversible steps, has avoided errors of that scale. Sandercock and McFarlane do not deny power: they hold that it is better fought from many voices and experiments than from a counter-plan just as totalising.
The lesson is that postmodern planning got the diagnosis right, there is no single public and no single knowledge, and still owes an answer to the question of power: who decides when voices do not agree and land has a price. The city of the future is probably built with both, the openness to complexity and diversity the postmodern turn introduced, and the capacity to name and limit the interests that, plan or no plan, keep shaping the city.
Frequently asked questions
What is postmodern urban planning?
The set of approaches that since the 1980s abandoned the single, rational, centralised plan to attend to diversity, participation and complexity: Sandercock's insurgent planning, Healey's collaborative planning and assemblage theory, which understands the city as a contingent network of people, objects and infrastructures.
What critique does assemblage theory receive in urbanism?
Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth argue that, taken as ontology, it places an investment fund and a park bench on the same plane, describes connections but does not explain who rules or why the city is produced as it is, and that participation without power can become a ritual.
