Power, Planning, and the City: A Foucaultian Perspective
Governing Urban Spaces, Enabling Citizen Lives: Power, Planning, and Freedom Through a Foucaultian Lens
walkable city ideal, the paper uncovers the complex and often subtle power dynamics, potential for exclusion, and normalizing effects that can be inherent in well-intentioned planning initiatives. The work ultimately advocates for a paradigm shift in urban planning, urging a move beyond traditional models of control towards approaches that actively foster practices of freedom, empowering citizens to shape their own lived environments.
conduct of conduct. It then meticulously examines how these concepts manifest within the urban context, portraying urban planning not as an external force but as an intrinsic modality of power operating through spatialization, normalization, and sophisticated governmental techniques. The contemporary ideal of the walkable city serves as a central case study. This example is critically deconstructed to illustrate the inherent ambivalences and potential dangers within urban development, demonstrating how such initiatives, despite their benefits, can simultaneously enact forms of discipline, normalization, social sorting, and intensified control. Moving beyond a purely critical stance, the paper explores the potential for fostering practices of freedom within these inescapable dynamics of urban power. It argues for urban planning approaches that prioritize persistent critique of planning norms, embrace agonistic political engagement, actively cultivate heterotopias (spaces of otherness and difference), design for strategic reversibility, and encourage profound ethical self-reflection among planners. The ultimate aim is to reorient planning from a practice of mere regulation and order towards one that enables citizen agency, supports diverse urban lives, and thereby fosters more critical, empowering, and ultimately more just and vibrant urban futures.
1 Problematizing Power in the Urban Sphere
Michel Foucault’s critical analyses of power, knowledge, and the subject offer invaluable, though sometimes challenging, tools for understanding how modern urban environments are constituted and how the practice of urban planning operates within them. While Foucault did not dedicate specific treatises solely to the city, his conceptual framework allows us to fundamentally problematize the urban sphere – that is, to question its apparent neutrality and reveal the historically specific power relations that shape its physical form, social dynamics, and the very ways we think about and govern it. Viewing the city through a Foucaultian lens means moving beyond simplistic technical or economic interpretations that might see planning as merely optimizing efficiency or managing growth. Instead, it invites us to perceive the city as a dense, multi-layered concentration of power relations – disciplinary mechanisms that shape bodies and behaviours, and governmental rationalities aimed at managing populations for particular ends. This perspective crucially shifts our understanding of power away from traditional models focused solely on sovereign command or overt repression, revealing instead its diffuse, capillary, productive, and spatially embedded nature. Applying Foucault’s analytics of power (such as relationality, productivity, discipline, governmentality, and the power/knowledge nexus, discussed elsewhere), this article examines how these concepts manifest within the specific context of urbanization and planning practices. It identifies inherent ambiguities and dangers using the contemporary ideal of the “walkable city” as a case study, and finally explores the potential for fostering critical awareness and “practices of freedom” – ways planning might empower rather than merely govern – within the inescapable dynamics of urban power.
2 A Foucaultian Framework for Urban Power, Planning, and the Walkable City
2.1 Problematizing Power in the Urban Sphere
Michel Foucault’s critical genealogies of power, knowledge, and the subject provide indispensable tools for analyzing the constitution of modern urban environments and the practices of urban planning. While not explicitly an “urban theorist,” his conceptual apparatus allows for a profound problematization of the city as a dense node of power relations, disciplinary mechanisms, and governmental rationalities. This analysis moves beyond traditional views of power as solely sovereign or repressive, revealing its diffuse, productive, and spatially embedded nature. We will first outline the core tenets of Foucault’s analytics of power, then examine their manifestation within the urban context and planning practices, identify inherent dangers, and finally, explore the potential for fostering freedom, specifically considering the contemporary ideal of the “walkable city” through a Foucaultian lens.
2.2 The Foucaultian Analytics of Power
Foucault’s primary contribution lies in decentering traditional conceptions of power. He posits that power should be understood not as a possession or a top-down structure, but as a dynamic field of force relations (Foucault 1978, 92). Several key dimensions define this perspective. Firstly, power exhibits relationality and immanence; it exists in action, exercised through a multiplicity of micro-relations dispersed throughout the social body, rather than emanating solely from a central source. Macro-dominations emerge from these localized strategies (Foucault 1978, 92–94; 2000, xvi). Secondly, power demonstrates productivity. Contrary to the “repressive hypothesis” which views power as merely prohibitive, Foucault argued it is fundamentally productive, generating knowledge, shaping subjectivities, inciting discourse, and producing “reality” itself (Foucault 1995, 194; 1978, 47–48, 119). Thirdly, the power/knowledge nexus highlights their mutual constitution and inseparability.
Regimes of knowledge emerge from power relations, while knowledge simultaneously reinforces and extends those relations; each presupposes the other (Foucault 1995, 27, 184–94; 2000, xvi). A fourth key modality is disciplinary power, which operates through precise techniques aimed at rendering bodies docile and useful. These techniques include enclosure, spatial partitioning (cellularity), functional site assignment, temporal regulation (timetables), detailed control of gestures, and hierarchical surveillance, exemplified by the Panopticon (Foucault 1995, 135–70, 200–209). Finally, bio-power and governmentality represent crucial developments. Bio-power marks the entry of life itself into the calculations of power, operating at two poles: the anatomo-politics of the human body (discipline) and the bio-politics of the population (regulating health, birth rates, longevity) (Foucault 1978, 139–45). Governmentality refers to the broader “conduct of conduct”—the ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, and tactics that allow for the governance of populations, often through rationalities focused on security and optimization (Foucault 2000, 201–22; Hanlen 2013, 90–99).
2.3 Urbanization as a Field of Power/Knowledge
The city, viewed through this framework, emerges as a critical site for the deployment and intensification of modern power techniques. It functions as the disciplinary city, where urban space materializes disciplinary principles. Zoning partitions functions, architecture creates enclosures, street layouts (like the grid) facilitate surveillance and ordered movement, and regulations (building codes, traffic laws) normalize behavior (Foucault 1995, 141–94, 170–77; Klauser, Paasche, and Söderström 2014, 875). Simultaneously, it is the governmentalized city, where urban planning acts as a primary instrument of governmentality and bio-power. Infrastructure development (sanitation, transport), public health initiatives, housing policies, and statistical analysis serve as techniques for managing populations, optimizing flows, ensuring security, and enhancing collective productivity (Foucault 1978, 140–44; 2000, 90–105, 134–56; Hanlen 2013, 125–28, 158–65). The historical management of urban crises like plagues exemplifies the convergence of disciplinary and security apparatuses (Foucault 1995, 195–200). Furthermore, the city operates as the epistemic city, where urban institutions like hospitals, schools, factories, and prisons function as laboratories for the human sciences. These institutions produce knowledge about individuals and populations through observation, examination, and classification, thereby objectifying and individualizing subjects (Foucault 1995, 184–94, 249–56).
2.4 The Nexus of Power and Urban Planning
Urban planning is not external to power but is an intrinsic modality of its operation within the urban field. Spatialization functions as governance, as planning inscribes power relations into the physical fabric of the city. Decisions about land use, infrastructure, circulation, and visibility become techniques for governing conduct through spatial means (Foucault 1995, 141–49, 170–77; 2000, 221; Mashhadi Moghadam and Rafieian 2019, 2–3; Esmaeili, Nourian, and Sheydayi 2024, 2). Planning also achieves normalization via urban norms, establishing and enforcing aesthetic, functional, social, and hygienic standards that differentiate, classify, and hierarchize spaces and populations. This process produces the “normal” city and citizen while marginalizing deviations (Foucault 1995, 177–84, 298–301). Finally, planning itself operates as governmentality, employing diverse techniques—from expert knowledge and statistical modeling to public participation processes and economic incentives—to manage urban complexity, regulate populations, and steer development towards desired outcomes (Foucault 2000, 201–22; Klauser, Paasche, and Söderström 2014, 873–75).
2.5 Ambivalences and Dangers: The Walkable City Example
The exercise of power through urban planning, even when aimed at desirable goals like walkability, carries inherent risks and ambivalences. The “walkable city” ideal serves as a pertinent case study illustrating these complexities. Promoting walkability can be seen as a form of discipline and normalization. It involves disciplining bodies to move in specific ways (pedestrian pathways, controlled crossings) and normalizing walking as the preferred, healthy, or virtuous mode of urban mobility. This can subtly marginalize other mobilities and disadvantage those unable to walk easily, with design elements like sidewalk width and bench placement acting as a micro-physics of power guiding bodily conduct (Foucault 1995, 135–56). Walkability is also justified through governmental rationalities aimed at population health, environmental security, economic optimization, and social order (“eyes on the street”). It thus becomes a technique for the “conduct of conduct,” encouraging behaviors aligned with policy objectives (Foucault 2000, 201–22; Hanlen 2013, 90–99). The knowledge/power dynamic is evident in walkable design, where specific forms of expert knowledge (urban design, public health data, traffic models) underpin and legitimate initiatives, potentially overshadowing local perspectives (Foucault 1995, 27–28). Furthermore, creating walkable zones involves spatial reconfiguration that can lead to exclusion. While enhancing pedestrian access, it may also cause gentrification, displacement, and new forms of exclusion for those reliant on other transport modes or with specific accessibility needs. Highly managed walkable zones can also lead to intensified control and surveillance through strict rules and CCTV, limiting spontaneous uses of space (Klauser, Paasche, and Söderström 2014, 878–80). Finally, like any planning initiative, walkability projects can represent the “dark side” of planning, masking underlying power plays and serving specific interests under the guise of public benefit Esmaeili, Nourian, and Sheydayi (2024).
2.6 Towards Practices of Freedom in Urban Planning
Given that power is inescapable, the Foucaultian question shifts from seeking liberation from power to asking how practices of freedom can be exercised within power relations. For urban planning, this suggests several approaches. Persistent critique is essential, involving ongoing efforts to reveal the contingent power relations and historical specificities embedded in planning norms, including those promoting walkability, by asking who benefits and making visible mechanisms of exclusion (Mashhadi Moghadam and Rafieian 2019, 11–12; Foucault 1995, 31). Planning should also involve embracing agonism, recognizing it not as a search for technical consensus but as a field where conflicts over values and space are negotiated, ensuring power remains mobile and contestable (Mashhadi Moghadam and Rafieian 2019, 8–9).
Another strategy is cultivating heterotopias and counter-conducts by designing or allowing spaces that enable deviation from dominant norms—Foucault’s “heterotopias” (Foucault 1995, 141; Hanlen 2013, 54–57).
In the context of walkability, this might mean tolerating informal uses of pedestrian space, ensuring accessibility for diverse bodies, resisting overly sanitized environments, and recognizing walking itself as potential resistance. Designing interventions with strategic reversibility in mind is also crucial, acknowledging potential downsides and aiming for flexibility to allow power relations to be modified (Foucault 1978, 95). Lastly, planners can engage in ethical self-reflection, adopting an ethics of self-awareness (“care of the self”) to critically examine their own role within power/knowledge structures and strive to expand possibilities rather than merely implementing predetermined rationalities (Foucault 1986; Mashhadi Moghadam and Rafieian 2019, 12).
2.7 The City as a Site of Strategic Engagement
A Foucaultian perspective illuminates the city and its planning not as neutral technical fields, but as deeply political arenas constituted by complex, productive power relations. Concepts like walkability, while potentially beneficial, are embedded within disciplinary and governmental rationalities that require critical scrutiny. Freedom, in this view, is not an end state achieved by escaping power, but an ongoing ethical and political practice of challenging, negotiating, and strategically modifying the relations of power that inevitably shape urban life.
3 Ambivalences and Dangers: The Walkable City Example
The inherent entanglement of planning with power means that even initiatives aimed at seemingly universally desirable goals, such as creating the “walkable city,” carry inherent risks, ambiguities, and potential negative consequences when viewed critically. The contemporary push for walkability serves as a pertinent case study illustrating these complexities.
Promoting walkability can be seen as a form of discipline and normalization. It involves disciplining bodies to move in specific ways along designated pathways and normalizing walking as the preferred mode, potentially marginalizing other mobilities or disadvantaging those unable to walk easily. Design details act as a subtle micro-physics of power. Walkability initiatives are also frequently justified through explicit governmental rationalities aimed at achieving policy objectives related to health, environment, economy, and social order, thus becoming a technique for the “conduct of conduct” that potentially limits alternative lifestyles.
The knowledge/power dynamic is also evident, as the design relies heavily on expert knowledge which may overshadow local perspectives or community-valued assets. Furthermore, the spatial reconfiguration involved can lead to exclusion and gentrification. While enhancing pedestrian access for some, these changes can displace lower-income residents and businesses or create new barriers for those reliant on vehicle access or whose use of public space doesn’t conform to curated norms.
Highly managed walkable zones can also lead to intensified control and surveillance through stricter rules, CCTV, or defensive architecture, limiting spontaneity and democratic use of space. Finally, like any large-scale initiative, walkability projects can sometimes mask underlying power plays or serve specific interests (like developers or tourism) under the guise of universal public benefit, distracting from deeper structural issues.
4 Towards Practices of Freedom: Planning as Enablement
Given that power, in a Foucaultian sense, is not something one can simply escape but is rather a constitutive element of social relations, the crucial political and ethical question shifts. Instead of seeking an impossible liberation from power, we must ask how practices of freedom can be exercised within the intricate web of power relations that shape urban life. This involves rethinking the role of planning itself – moving away from a model solely focused on imposing order or achieving predetermined outcomes, towards one that emphasizes enabling citizens to shape their own environments and pursue diverse ways of life. For urban planning, this suggests several interconnected approaches:
Persistent critique remains essential, but with a focus on how planning might over-govern. This involves the ongoing, reflexive effort to uncover and question not only exclusionary power relations but also the ways in which planning norms, policies, and designs might unnecessarily constrain citizen agency or prescribe narrow definitions of acceptable urban life. It means constantly asking: Does this regulation truly serve a vital public purpose, or does it merely limit possibilities? How can planning frameworks become more flexible and less prescriptive? Whose definition of ‘order’ or ‘good design’ is being imposed?
Planning should also involve embracing agonism and genuine participation, recognizing that the city is inherently a site of diverse, often conflicting interests, values, and desired ways of life. Rather than striving for a potentially illusory or coercive technical consensus imposed from above, planning processes should facilitate genuine negotiation and contestation. This means creating robust arenas where different perspectives can be articulated, debated, and potentially integrated, acknowledging that disagreement is a vital sign of a healthy public sphere. This approach keeps power relations visible and challenges the notion that planners hold all the answers, positioning them more as facilitators of dialogue than as architects of a singular vision.
Crucially, this perspective champions cultivating heterotopias and supporting counter-conducts. This means moving beyond merely tolerating difference towards actively designing, protecting, or simply allowing spaces and frameworks that enable deviation from dominant norms and prescribed functions. It involves creating urban environments rich in potential, where citizens have the tools and the freedom to adapt spaces to their own needs and desires. This could manifest as supporting community gardens, enabling flexible use of public spaces, simplifying regulations for temporary projects (‘Zwischennutzung’), preserving informal markets, or designing infrastructure (like open source digital platforms or adaptable physical structures) that citizens can appropriate. It requires resisting the urge to over-design or over-regulate every square meter, recognizing the inherent value of ambiguity, informality, and citizen-led adaptation in fostering vibrant and resilient urban life. The goal is not to dictate outcomes, but to provide a robust yet flexible stage upon which diverse urban lives can unfold.
Designing interventions with strategic reversibility and adaptability becomes even more critical in this context. Creating enabling frameworks rather than fixed masterplans means building in mechanisms for learning, adaptation, and modification based on how citizens actually use and reshape their environment. Acknowledging the inherent uncertainty of the future and the dynamic nature of cities means prioritizing adaptable infrastructure and flexible regulations that allow urban forms and functions to evolve organically in response to changing needs and citizen initiatives.
Lastly, planners and designers must engage in profound ethical self-reflection (Care of the Self). This involves critically examining their own role not just within power/knowledge structures, but specifically considering whether their actions tend towards control or enablement. Adopting an ethics of self-awareness means understanding how professional biases or institutional pressures might lead towards overly prescriptive solutions. The aim shifts towards consciously striving to use planning tools to expand possibilities, provide resources, and challenge unnecessary constraints for citizens, empowering them to become active agents in shaping their city, rather than merely implementing predetermined rationalities or reinforcing top-down control.
In Praxis: Planning as Control vs. Enablement The theoretical tension between planning as a form of governmental control and planning as an enabler of citizen freedom manifests in concrete urban development practices worldwide. Examining examples helps illustrate these contrasting approaches.
On one hand, we see negative examples emphasizing control and over-governance. Consider the large-scale urban renewal projects common in the mid-20th century. Often framed in terms of hygiene and progress, these initiatives frequently involved the top-down imposition of a singular vision, displacing established communities and replacing complex social fabrics with rigidly zoned, monofunctional environments like large housing estates or expansive highways. This represents a forceful exercise of power/knowledge where expert opinion overrides local realities. Similarly, overly restrictive zoning codes that rigidly separate uses and impose minute regulations can stifle organic urban evolution, limit possibilities for diverse lifestyles, and normalize a specific model of urbanism, constraining how citizens live and work. Certain “smart city” initiatives focused primarily on data collection and surveillance, under the guise of efficiency, also exemplify digital governmentality that can increase social sorting and chill public expression without necessarily empowering citizens. Furthermore, the use of hostile architecture – designing public spaces to deter specific uses or exclude groups like the homeless through features like bench dividers or studs – is a clear example of disciplinary power embedded directly in the physical environment, enforcing norms by making alternative uses impossible.
On the other hand, positive examples emphasize enablement and citizen agency. Processes like participatory budgeting directly shift power dynamics by allowing residents to decide how public funds are allocated for local projects, positioning planning as a resource provider rather than a sole decision-maker. Policies supporting flexible land use and temporary use (‘Zwischennutzung’), such as allowing citizen-initiated pop-up parks or community gardens on vacant land, move away from rigid master planning and acknowledge the value of informality and experimentation, providing tools for citizens to activate their city. Planning frameworks that facilitate self-organized collective housing projects, like Germany’s Baugruppen, empower citizens to design and manage their own living environments, offering tools for alternative community creation instead of relying solely on top-down provision. Providing accessible open data platforms and supporting civic tech fosters transparency and empowers citizen critique and co-creation, challenging the monopoly of expert knowledge. Finally, designing adaptive infrastructure, like streets easily reconfigured for different uses or buildings with flexible floor plans, embodies strategic reversibility and provides frameworks that accommodate citizen-led modifications over time.
These contrasting examples illustrate that planning inevitably shapes possibilities. A Foucaultian lens, however, encourages a critical awareness of how this occurs, pushing towards approaches that prioritize providing flexible frameworks, essential resources, and genuine opportunities for participation, thereby enabling citizens to exercise their own “practices of freedom” in shaping the cities they inhabit.
5 Planning for Freedom, Not Just Order
In conclusion, adopting a Foucaultian perspective provides a powerful analytical lens for understanding the city and the practice of urban planning. It moves us beyond seeing planning as a neutral, technical field focused solely on efficiency or aesthetics, revealing it instead as a deeply political arena constituted by complex, productive, and often invisible power relations. Widely accepted concepts like walkability, while potentially offering significant benefits, are shown to be embedded within specific disciplinary techniques and governmental rationalities that demand ongoing critical scrutiny regarding their effects and potential for over-governance.
Freedom, from this viewpoint, is not conceived as a final state achieved by escaping power, but rather as an ongoing, situated, ethical, and political practice both for citizens and for planners. For planning, this implies a crucial shift in emphasis: away from a primary focus on imposing order and controlling outcomes, towards creating enabling conditions where citizens possess the tools, resources, and spatial possibilities to pursue diverse forms of life and actively shape their own urban existence. It involves the continuous work of challenging unnecessary constraints, fostering genuine dialogue and negotiation, cultivating spaces for difference and adaptation, questioning dominant forms of expertise, and strategically modifying the intricate relations of power that inevitably shape urban life. Recognizing the city as a site of strategic engagement, where planning acts more as a facilitator and provider of frameworks than a director of conduct, opens up new possibilities for more critical, reflective, empowering, and ultimately more just and vibrant urban futures.
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