Insurgent Planning Practice

This book investigates insurgent planning practices and their potential for alternative forms of civic engagement and democracy-building. It explores how planners can challenge technocratic planning by incorporating notions of participation, inclusion, trans-sectionality and the right to the city into their daily practices. Each chapter delves into those daily practices to answer: What does insurgent planning practice look like in practice? How are radical planners coping with traditional, technocratic planning as practised in most places around the world? And what do they do to advance an agenda of democratisation and the right to the city, counteracting neoliberal forms of governance?


Chapters draw on conversations with planners in several cities around the world, cataloguing insurgent experiences that challenge the status quo of contemporary market-based, exclusionary city-making. Throughout, cross-cutting issues such as gender, race and class are explored to consider ways in which insurgent planners bring diversity into planning.

Roberto Rocco is Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanisation (2019).


Gabriel Silvestre is Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University.