Decolonising spatial planning research through a relational approach: insights from Auroville, India

This article employs an empirical and situated lens to examine how a relational approach can contribute to decolonising spatial planning research. The study investigates a specific ‘planning situation’ in rural India: Auroville – a utopian settlement founded in 1968, whose modernist city plan continues to play a fundamental role in shaping the local socio-natural configuration. The specificity of this case study provides an opportunity to critically explore the potential of a non-modern descriptive approach to unravel the multiple entanglements produced by a deeply modern planning enactment. The article argues that a relational approach to planning research provides a critical framework for making visible the ways in which, within a given ‘planning situation’, diverse entities – human and more-than-human – co-produce physical space and knowledge. By shifting the analytical focus towards these entanglements, the study highlights the need to move beyond Eurocentric and technocratic planning paradigms and towards more inclusive, situated and decolonial planning perspectives.