Writing Transpacifically: Planning Theory / Theorist Yet-To-Come

This paper ponders the transpacific flows from a planning perspective. We planners and planning theorists, whose job shapes space, know transpacific financial, material and labour flows condensing as real estate can exacerbate imperial geographies. We know the ’trans‘ in the transpacific has an unmappable speed. Given these conditions, how might planning’s theoretical texts look like, while critically engaging the transpacific flows as well as planning’s role in exacerbation of imperial geographies? How could planning theory refuse the frequent demand for it to produce images of the future? Could texts be tools made of visual, conceptual or visual forces that readers can connect to other texts or social actions to initiate other ways to unsettle imperial geographies? To explore theoretical-texts as tools, this papers weaves in a quasi autoethnographic style, in the main-text and a series of collages, to query its own writing and thinking processes in this unimageable transpacific: What is a theorist or theory’s role in the transpacific, their relation to practice, and to ethics and hope? How to open the relation between theorist, people, knowledge, thinking and place? It asks as a refrain: What is the concept of ‘writing transpacifically’ becoming while writing, reading and thinking in the transpacific?