The politics of value in urban development: Valuing conflict in agonistic pluralism

In this article, we consider the role of value pluralism in theorising urban development and the politics of participatory planning. Rather than situating analyses of urban development in a monist or universalist ethics, where values are reducible to a single universal (e.g. human rights), or a normative pluralism based on the tension between different bearers of political value (e.g. liberty and equality), we argue for a plural ethics to make sense of the complex empirical reality of our cities. Post-consensus theories of planning treat the presence of conflict as an enduring reality in urban development, with Chantal Mouffe providing one way of conceptualising a productive politics of conflict. We extend Mouffe’s plural politics through an appeal to value pluralism in the form of anthropological theories of value. A better understanding of the plural and incommensurable nature of values not only contributes to our understanding of the operation of agonistic pluralism, it also provides a more robust theoretical account of how different urban actors in the city transition from antagonism to agonism, which Mouffe suggests is necessary for a more inclusive urban politics. The politics of value resides in the struggle for legitimacy of particular regimes of value; not just to determine economic value, but to define what value is, and how different values dominate, encompass or otherwise relate to one another. This moral politics approach, via value theory, provides one way of tracing an ethical urbanism that exists between conflict and consensus. It allows us to reframe the central challenge of agonistic pluralism as the transition from antagonistic positions, marked by moral intransigence and immutability, towards more flexible value positions that allow ‘adversaries’ to enter into a viable agonistic politics.