Cities by experts for the people: in search of spaces of hope in the intersections of power and knowledge

Abstract

Critical urban theorists have often given short shrift to bureaucracies as possible sites for emancipatory politics. Since Max Weber’s rendition of the “iron cage of bureaucracy” and Herbert Marcuse‘s critique of the “one-dimensional man,” academic writing tends to portray professional experts working within bureaucracies as extensions of the coercive state and increasingly as collaborators of corporate powers amidst accelerating neoliberalization. Against this context, “spaces of hope” have been largely couched in the informal and the autonomous, where “local knowledge” and “bottom-up” initiatives are seen as key for generating alternative futures that resist the top-down, generic solutions imposed by technical experts. Recent studies on the nature of expertise suggest that the assumed dichotomy between expert and indigenous knowledge has at times been overstated. Although expert practices have been central to the rise of modern statecraft and hence the normative configuration of power/knowledge, experts are constantly required to make pragmatic accommodation in projects and policies in actual operations. Despite being increasingly subjected to managerialist initiatives and market-based solutions, growing skepticism about the “reach of the state” has also promulgated new forms of reflexivity and aspirations amongst professionals and bureaucrats. This panel will examine the roles of professional experts whose agencies are both augmented and restricted by bureaucratic structures. These may include urban planners, architects, development consultants, systems analysts and others whose epistemologies and interventions are spatial in nature. Research that explores the techno-politics of practice, the cultural world of expertise and performativity of administrative apparatuses are especially welcome. By examining how expertise has been reconfigured in ongoing reshaping of political formations, we ask whether there are potentials for emancipatory politics in the unlikeliest of places.