Recovering the Politics of Planning: Developer Contributions and the Contemporary Housing Question

What policy responses are available to the contemporary class fragmentation associated with homeownership? The goal of this paper is to recover the politics of planning with focus on the state- planning tool ‘developer... [ view full abstract ]

What policy responses are available to the contemporary class fragmentation associated with homeownership? The goal of this paper is to recover the politics of planning with focus on the state- planning tool ‘developer contributions’. We draw on David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession and ‘spaces of hope’ to acknowledge not only (new) spaces of inequality, but also the cracks in contemporary capitalism – material and discursive spaces for alternatives. These theoretical foundations are valuable to develop and build-on Engels’ discussions on ‘The Housing Question’ (1872) and add complexity to the post- political perspective as championed by Erik Swyngedouw (2007). In scrutinising the potentials of developer contributions within the Contemporary Housing Question, Harvey is not only required to lay the foundation for more pragmatism within leftist camps, fulfilling an ethical imperative within planning. Harvey’s theories are also, crucially, invaluable in terms of analysing empirical contradictions ‘on the ground’ that are more ambiguous than both Engels and Swyngedouw suggest. In order to make our case we review existing literature on developer contributions, exploring the ways in which developer contributions can be analysed as both a sign of hope and as a disaster. We offer a dialectical reading, and make a proposal as to what next?