Experimental Artistic Approaches to Citizen Involvement in Planning: Actors in Networks and Power-Relations

Abstract

Citizen involvement has become taken for granted in liberal democratic planning and is in Norway required by law. However, planning processes are also power-processes often involving strong, political and economic interests where more marginal actants easily can feel (or deliberately become) manipulated to accept, for them, disadvantageous decisions. In this article, Foucaultian notions of power-knowledge relations and poststructuralist methods of openness and responsivity are discussed through artistic interventions and experimental citizens engagement in the Tromsø Waterfront Laboratory 2020 (TWL). The case is related to a contested development of a harbourfront area and the parallel revision of the municipal masterplan for Tromsø city centre. The aim is to confront internalised structures and units in planning and the discursive regularities of the planning process, heavily impacted by strong power-structures, confining the plan as a democratic means. The TWL project evolves in the wake of previous experimental planning and participation processes in Tromsø as the The City Development Year 2005 (CDY), and reveals the discrepancies there often are between good intentions and real influence. The article also explores how new objects and subjects can emerge as a multitude of actants and alternative networks from positions that are normally conceived as subjugated in power-relations.