BETWEEN

F. P. Chan, PhD, MCIP, RRP

Langara College (2017-10-10)
Planning Theory, Ethics + Practice (Week 05)
 Q: What is the Relationship
between Theory and Practice?
 “We're in the process of
experiencing a new relationship
between theory and practice”
- Gilles Deleuze + Michel Foucault
“Theory is exactly like a
Box of Tools”
- Gilles Deleuze + Michel Foucault
What is Theory?
Theory:
“A system or
collection of ideas
that are intended to
explain something.”
Theories are never finalised
 Theory + Practice:
An Asymmetrical Relationship
Planning takes place in the
Incomplete Space between
theory and practice.
A Practitioner never just practice
A theorist never just theorise
WHAT
ELSE
?!?
 RESEARCH ABOUT DESIGN >>> THEORY ABOUT PRACTICE
RESEARCH FOR DESIGN >>> THEORY FOR PRACTICE
RESEARCH THROUGH DESIGN >>> THEORY THROUGH PRACTICE
 THEORY
ABOUT
PRACTICE
 Theorisation is paying
attention to what is not said
rather than to what is said.
John A. Walker, Design History and the History of Design
 THEORY
FOR
PRACTICE
 An activity carried out during
the planning process
to support an intended outcome.
Peter Downton, Design Research
 We can recognise and describe
deviations from a norm very much
more clearly than we can describe
the norm itself.
Geoffrey Vickers, cited in Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner
 THEORY
THROUGH
PRACTICE
Translating Theory to Practice
is a Messy Business
“Concepts are really monsters that
are reborn from their fragments.”
- Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari
“Practice is a set of relays from
one theoretical point to another,
and theory is a relay from one
practice to another”
- Gilles Deleuze + Michel Foucault
Between Theory and Practice
is a Surplus
 WHAT IS
THINKING
?!?
To think is to engage all the senses and
forces that underlies the stable world
privileged by the model of recognition.
Something in the world forces us to think.
This something is an object not of
recognition, but of a fundamental
encounter. What is encountered may be
Socrates, a temple, or a demon. It may be
grasped in a range of affective tones:
wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In
whichever tone, its primary characteristic
is that it can only be sensed.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
PLANE OF IMMANENCE PLANE OF ORGANISATION
Becomings / Emergence ~~~~~ Transcendence
Open-Ended Trajectories ~~~~~ Closed Goals
Rhizomatic Multiplicities ~~~~~ Hierarchical Relations of Power
Chance ~~~~~ Planned Development
Smooth Space ~~~~~ Striated Space
Dynamism and Flux ~~~~~ Fixed Identity
Power to ~~~~~ Power Over
The plane of immanence is an Event
where all possible events expressing
concepts and identities are brought
together, and new connections are
made and unmade continuously.
Jean Hillier, Plan(e) Speaking: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning
Reece Terris, Houses Beautiful, (Installation at VAG) 2009
Make plans that inspire
rethinking assumptions.
 What else can
a concept of community be?
 The Urban Environment is a meshwork of
steel, concrete, natural life, wires, wheels,
digital codes, and humans placed in close
proximity and it is the rhythms of the
juxtapositions and associations – coming
together in symbolic projections, cultural
routines, institutional practices, regulatory
norms, physical flows, technological regimes,
experience of the landscape, software systems
– that surge through the human experience.
Ash Amin, Urban Planning in an Uncertain World
 Care for
fresh
community?
MAYBE THE
COMMUNITY
ISN’T…
 Knowledge is an ‘invention’ behind which lies
something completely different from itself: the
play of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, and the
will to appropriate. Knowledge is produced on
the stage where these elements struggle
against each other; its production is not the
effect of their harmony or joyful equilibrium,
but of their hatred, of their questionable and
provisional compromise, and of the fragile
truce that they are always prepared to betray.
It is not a permanent faculty, but an event, or,
at the very least, a series of events.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
Why not plan with Uncertainty?
Make a Plan(e) of Immanence?
An Incomplete Plan
“… Temporary Respites in an
Ongoing Confrontation”
- Chantal Mouffe,
Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism
What would
such a plan
look like?
 “A text that imposes a
state of loss, the text that
discomforts (perhaps to
the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the
reader’s historical,
cultural, psychological
assumptions.”
Roland Barthes,
The Pleasure of the Text
 We must see ourselves as vague or
indefinite beings prior to the fixed qualities
that tie us to grounds or lands… As
indeterminate spatial bodies, we are thus
something else than calculating individuals,
organic members of communities, or even
cheerful participants in a nice civil society
John Rajchman, Constructions
In groups of 3 to 4 persons…
- Discuss an instance in your practice when a
theory espoused is radically transformed
through practice.
- What new kinds of theories, concepts and ways
of articulation emerge?
- How did your subsequent practice change as a
result of this new theoretical shift?