An uncivil turn: instituting planning in the populist moment

The rise of populist political expression over recent decades has happened in parallel with ongoing debate about how planning should relate to civil society. To some extent both developments can be seen to grow from dissatisfaction with ‘traditional’, top-down modes of governance, which have continued to come under strain in the late-neoliberal, ‘post-political’ era. This article engages with how these trends relate to one another, through analysis of a populist newspaper produced in the UK, The Light, which is animated by conspiracist thinking and has been characterized as far-right. The complicated emergence and influence of The Light’s grassroots-driven populism has interrelated implications for planning’s theorization of and response to both political populism and the ‘civic turn’. These implications are drawn out and discussed using the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, supplemented by Roberto Esposito’s notion of institution. The paper concludes by exploring whether the upsurge in populism pushes planning to make its case anew and the ways in which an instituted planning as per Esposito might be more convincing in this regard than the communicative and agonistic paradigms that have dominated recent theoretical debate.