Chronicle of a controversy, foretold: urban planning narrative in the age of sustainable urban development

This report investigates the emergence of agriculture as a new figure of  the “urban planning narrative” (Bernardo Secchi’s term). After reviewing the ever-controversial relations between the urban and the rural, the authors examine the way in which different actors mobilise nature and agriculture to produce a narrative of urban space, telling the story of the city of the future – that which is demanded by the doxa of sustainable urban development – and create consensus concerning the production of territory. The analysis of a development controversy, one concerning the reclassification of a plot of 58 hectares in the agricultural zone of canton Geneva (Switzerland) to construct 3000 homes and various communal facilities, allows the construction of a genealogy of this new urban planning discourse.

To achieve this, four types of sources are used: semi-structured interviews, urban planning documents, material gathered from an undisclosed participant observation, and the documentation produced in the course of a referendum campaign relating to the declassification of the plot of land in question, together with the comments posted on various relevant electronic forums. The analysis allows three phases to be distinguished, which are three figures within the urban planning narrative: the genesis of the master plan as the epos of a territory (history of Genevan master plans), the district plan as a novel (observation of a group working to produce a development plan appropriate to a site and a programme), and the counter-narratives of a controversy (the development of a referendum campaign). The prosopopoeia of sustainable urban development appears here as a production which is eminently intertextual and rhizomatic, in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, involving the citing of the various products of the knowledge-producing machine that is urban planning practice. Finally, the long-term analysis offered here allows a deeper reflection on the nature of the activity of urban planning itself, which is supposed to be both technical and political. It could indeed be true that making a city inherently involves telling stories.