Abstract
Too often, planning theory misidentifies how planning and governance practice actually works in troublesome zones understood as unplanned or ungoverned. To counter this tendency, I use ethnographic research in one of the most active border economies in the hemisphere, where noncompliance with trade and use-of-space laws is widespread. In contrast to the commonly held assessment that Ciudad del Este, Paraguay is lawless and unplanned, I show how planners promote elite-led and exclusionary urban transformation via the strategic deployment of narratives of the unplanned city, what I call “city-stories.” However, city-stories are also a terrain of contestation. I analyze the city-stories of precarious street vendors as a diagnostic of power, as embodied perspectives on everyday practices of regulation that can clarify how local state actors actively foster spatial disorder and legal uncertainty as part of planning practice.
References
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Author biography
Jennifer Tucker is a PhD candidate in the department of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, Jennifer draws from global urban studies, comparative political economy, and feminist geography to study the regulation and spatial politics of uneven development under globalization. Concerned with claims to livelihood and the city, Jennifer uses feminist and ethnographic methodologies to interrogate new landscapes of urban planning, political authority and collective action as a means to imagine and make more just futures.
