Johan Pries

The argument running through Sevilla-Buitrago’s analysis is that spatial planning as a form of expertise cannot be untethered from capitalist urbanization, but that planning also must be related to urban commons, conceptualized as the actually existing self-management of resources in opposition to capital. The book’s four case studies are used all in an argument contending that planning must ‘neutralize, erode, or subsume’ commons to make urban life more compatible with capitalist relations. From the enclosures of the London’s rural hinterlands, Olmsted’s grand plans for Central Park in New York, the ultimately ill-fated social democratic compromises on housing developments in Weimar Berlin and late 20th century radical activism in Milan, the book demonstrates that planning has a tendency to ‘decommonize’ cities and prepare the ground for capital accumulation. Planning in this understanding tends to align with capital and against the commons, yet Sevilla-Buitrago also suggests that this is not the entire picture. Capital and commons might be competing and antagonistic ways to organize social relationships around resources as either commodities to be traded or communal assets to be shared, but planning is seldom fully and only allied with capital. To Sevilla-Buitrago, planning is both a way that the capitalist commodity form historically has expanded its reach and ‘a dynamic site and means of spatial struggle’ where this process has been resisted.