Value magic Lake, Robert W
Environment and planning. A,
02/2023
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its ...coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a material force that is real in its consequences. Unpacking the concept of value reveals a contentious debate regarding the ontological status of value as a driver of the urban process. Alternative formulations posit value as intrinsic or extrinsic, objective or subjective, residing in the world or constructed in the mind, driven by universal law or spatially and temporally contingent. Transcending all such dualisms, a transactional approach drawn from Deweyan pragmatism understands value as a co-constitutive interrelation among a valuing subject, an object of valuation, and the enveloping context in which valuation occurs. The delineation of value's ontology is fraught with political consequences for reproducing or altering the urban status quo. The move toward desired outcomes begins with articulating the foundational assumptions that underlie the value practices propelling the urban process in specific situations. Pluralizing value assumptions focuses the problem on the political question concerning whose value(s) prevail in a given situation. This redefinition shifts the focus from ameliorating current practices of extracting value to politically contesting the value commitments at work in the world.
YIMBYISM THEN AND NOW Lake, Robert W.
International journal of urban and regional research,
March 2022, Volume:
46, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The upsurge in anti‐regulatory rhetoric known as YIMBYism has deep historical roots in laissez‐faire liberalism. Contemporary YIMBYism lacks empirical validation; embraces a categorical fallacy; ...embodies moral failure; exemplifies the arrogance of policy expertise; reveals the maturation of neoliberalism; and provides an object lesson in the dominance of power politics in the production of truth in the contemporary moment.
Justice As Subject and Object of Planning Lake, Robert W.
International journal of urban and regional research,
November 2016, 2016-11-00, 20161101, Volume:
40, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Considerations of justice have moved to a central place in planning theory following Susan Fainstein's (2010) eloquent plea to elevate justice to the principal criterion for the evaluation of ...planning practice. Justice based on this understanding is the object of planning—the normative end that planning practice should strive to achieve. In this essay I explore the implications for planning theory and practice of making justice the subject rather than the object of planning. This formulation places justice at the center of rather than regarding it as the outcome of practice: what is of concern here is planning as the practice of justice rather than the justice of planning practice. The question for planning in this mode shifts from ‘Is this a just outcome?' to ‘What is justice in this situation?'. Based on John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, this question transcends the dualisms between subject and object, and process and outcome, by understanding outcomes as already formulated (what Dewey called ends‐in‐view) in the process of their production. A planning process that takes justice as its subject is anti‐foundational and contextual rather than universal, anticipatory rather than retrospective, generative of solutions rather than evaluative of outcomes, culturally encompassing rather than project‐delimited, and inclusively democratic rather than expert‐driven. Examples from a variety of sources illustrate the practice of justice as the subject of planning.
Land Fictions Ghertner, D. Asher; Lake, Robert W
2021, 2021-03-15
eBook
Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the ...dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri- urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside
We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested ...landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include the following: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest thinning and prescribed burning solve the problem? (4) Should active forest management, including forest thinning, be concentrated in the wildland urban interface (WUI)? (5) Can wildfires on their own do the work of fuel treatments? (6) Is the primary objective of fuel reduction treatments to assist in future firefighting response and containment? (7) Do fuel treatments work under extreme fire weather? (8) Is the scale of the problem too great? Can we ever catch up? (9) Will planting more trees mitigate climate change in wNA forests? And (10) is post-fire management needed or even ecologically justified? Based on our review of the scientific evidence, a range of proactive management actions are justified and necessary to keep pace with changing climatic and wildfire regimes and declining forest heterogeneity after severe wildfires. Science-based adaptation options include the use of managed wildfire, prescribed burning, and coupled mechanical thinning and prescribed burning as is consistent with land management allocations and forest conditions. Although some current models of fire management in wNA are averse to short-term risks and uncertainties, the long-term environmental, social, and cultural consequences of wildfire management primarily grounded in fire suppression are well documented, highlighting an urgency to invest in intentional forest management and restoration of active fire regimes.
It is customary to ascribe responsibility to a sitting president for the policy enactments rolled out during that president's term in office. To do so, however, neglects the effect on policy of ...historical context and path-despondency. The Obama Administration's urban policies, no less than those of prior administrations, owe much of their character and methods to decisions and events that predated his ascendance to office. And as with most previous presidents, the predominant influence has been the subordination of urban and social policy to the needs of the economy.
Democracy everywhere is under siege, overwhelmed by oligarchy, apathy, bureaucracy, and spectacle, at best an ideal that has never been achieved. Yet against the dystopian vision of post-democracy ...and the post-political is what John Dewey, more than a half-century ago, called "creative democracy," a moral practice of radical equality in the pragmatic, collective project of hammering out answers to the question of how we should live. This article explores Dewey's concept of creative democracy as a moral idea, a personal ethic, a collective commitment, and a precondition for political practice. Establishing the conditions for creative democracy requires a significant reconsideration of the education of democratically competent citizens and of the democratic practice of research and knowledge production. Creative democracy is a poetic project, an imaginative opening, an ethical possibility, a shared responsibility, and a practice of hope that opens a path to achieving a better kind of life to be lived.
I am immensely grateful to Kathe Newman and James DeFilippis for organizing this discussion and to my colleagues for their astute, generous, and challenging engagement with my work. Their willingness ...to continue the conversation is all the affirmation that one could hope to receive. In this response, I comment on the ad hoc and provisional nature of academic knowledge and highlight the possibilities presented by pragmatism to forge a path to a better future.
Locating the Social in Social Justice Lake, Robert W.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers,
03/2018, Volume:
108, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A concept of social justice in which the social names a subset of justice suggests that the social constitutes a distinct sphere within which a distinctively social justice is produced and ...experienced and within which a specifically social injustice can be addressed. Theorists from Dewey to Latour to Foucault, however, have questioned the conceptualization of the social as a separate substantive domain within which a distinctively social justice can be found. I seek to move from a substantive to a relational conceptualization of the social in social justice, drawing from Dewey's concept of the social as an associative rather than an aggregative relation. A relational approach situates the social not in a delimited substantive domain within which justice can be assessed but as a mode of collective association through which justice is performed and produced. Relocating the social from a substantive sphere to a relational practice transforms the problem of social justice. Rather than assessing the justice of outcomes within a specifically social sphere, the problem of social justice addresses the interactive practices of social actors engaged in the collective project within which justice is dialectically and simultaneously a process and an outcome, a means and an end. I illustrate the challenges of practicing a relational conception of social justice in an antidisplacement protest against a neighborhood redevelopment proposal in Camden, New Jersey. The case study suggests that furthering the goal of social justice focuses on everyday practices of associative interaction in which relations of democratic equality are undermined or encouraged.
Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres ...in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and, from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance, Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior, undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance.
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