On Planning for Not Having a Plan?

What is it about?

Almost 80 years after anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman (1940, p. 1) observed that “people are losing faith in the existing institutions” and that “capitalist industrialism is defeating the very purpose it is supposed to serve”, names such as Goldman, Proudhon, Gandhi, Kropotkin and Rocker are mentioned in conjunction with a revival of prefigurative forms of anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist mechanisms of decision-making, accountability and justice. My aim is to explore prefigurative, planning-related, counter-institutional ideas; from early twentieth-century thinkers Proudhon and Kropotkin, via Reclus, Howard and early practitioners, to the late 1960s and beyond, including Bookchin’s Neighbourhood Planning Assemblies. I indicate understandings of anarchism and prefiguration, then outline some anarchist foundations of western planning. I discuss the relevance of Bookchin’s counter-institutional notion of municipalism, citing examples from Australia and the Mexican Zapatistas, before interrogating possible relationships between anarchist practices and macro-structures, asking whether anarchisms/anarcho-syndicalisms might replace, reform or exist in dual power with existing systems. I conclude that prefigurative experimental practices can offer potentialities for both exposing and prising open cracks in existing planning systems and also for doing planning differently.

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