Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems

Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: Understanding textual mediation in the contact zone

Föreläsare: Doktor Libby Porter
Tid: 14 juni 2012, 14.00
Plats: A305

Libby Porter teaches and researches in city planning at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland but is about to take up a post of Senior Lecturer at Monash University. She is the author of /Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning/ (with Ashgate 2010), and co-editor with Kate Shaw of /Whose Urban Renaissance? An international comparison of urban regeneration policies/ (with Routledge 2009). She is Assistant Editor of the journal Planning Theory and Practice, and co-founder and coordinator of Planners Network UK. Before joining the academic community in Australia and now the UK, Libby was a senior researcher on urban and planning policy with the Victorian State Government, Australia.

Article abstract

Indigenous peoples around the world are claiming and, in many cases, achieving recognition of their customary land rights, with significant challenges for planning systems. How should we understand both the nature of this demand and its politics of recognition? This article demonstrates how the insights and principles contained in political and democratic theory, along with a methodological framework inspired by Institutional Ethnography informs the conceptualization of what is happening between Indigenous peoples and planning systems in British settler-states. Using the highly evocative language of the 'contact zone' and an illustration from environmental planning in British Columbia, Canada, this article indicates how reading these theories together builds an approach for critically analysing the textual constraints placed on the social spaces where Indigenous peoples and state-based planning systems meet.