Abstract
While science and technology studies (STS) has provided fresh takes on the material practices of urban planning, discussions so far have tended to downplay the way STS may also help rethink its core political and institutional forms. In this chapter, I suggest that a pragmatist issue-centred approach to politics—as developed around actor-network theory (ANT)—has much to offer in terms of bringing the contested ecologies of urban planning processes into focus. I develop this claim by way of a (quasi‑)ethnographic case study into 20 years of controversy over the (un‑)sustainable future of the Kai Tak waterfront site in Hong Kong, as seen from the vantage point of emerging publics and their attempts to influence the trajectories of formal planning in this semi-democratic, executive-led polity.
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Blok, A. (2018). Planning Ecologies : Issue Publics and the Reassembling of Urban Green Trajectories. In: Kurath, M., Marskamp, M., Paulos, J., Ruegg, J. (eds) Relational Planning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60462-6_11
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