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Modes of technification: Expertise, urban controversies and the radicalness

of radical planning
Manuel Tironi
Planning Theory published online 24 December 2013
DOI: 10.1177/1473095213513579
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PLT0010.1177/1473095213513579Planning TheoryTironi

Article

Modes of technification:
Expertise, urban controversies
and the radicalness of radical
planning

Planning Theory
0(0) 120
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1473095213513579
plt.sagepub.com

Manuel Tironi

Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile, Chile

Abstract
This article questions radical plannings insistence on an ontological distinction between lay
and expert knowledge. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives in Santiago, Chile,
I explain how citizen organisations, in their quest for political recognition and emancipation,
embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, formal and instrumental knowledge and tactics. Utilising
insights from Science and Technology Studies, I call modes of technification the specific and
differentiated strategies by which these collectives become technical entities. Three of these
modes are described: the organisational, epistemic and generative modes. The larger claim is
that radical planning, by pursuing a politics of difference, may end up enacting a world in which
identities are essentialised and roles forcefully allocated.

Keywords
Citizen organisations, expertise, radical planning, Santiago de Chile

Introduction
The question of how to engage publics and communities in processes of urban change at
diverse scales has haunted planning practitioners and scholars for at least a century. How,
when, to what ends and through which means non-experts are to be included in planning
activities is still a contested matter. If in its beginnings the planning profession was
absorbed by science-based and rational schemes in which individual and collective
agents were merely seen as residual and passive recipients of experts actions, since the
1960s more progressive perspectives began questioning many of these traditional
Corresponding author:
Manuel Tironi, Instituto de Sociologa, Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile, Center for Sustainable
Urban Development (CEDEUS), Av. Vicua Mackenna 4860, Campus San Joaquin, Santiago 7820436, Chile.
Email: metironi@uc.cl

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(Western, top-down, hegemonic) principles (Sandercock, 1998). The result was the consolidation of what is known as radical planning, a programme in which individuals and
communities are accounted for as both the object and the engine of the planning process.
In an age of neoliberal technocracy, these radical perspectives have problematised the
knowledge hierarchies often at work in planning interventions and, therefore, the role
and nature of the expert as sole epistemic reference in the search for the common good.
Developmental change was not anymore a technical problem to be solved via arithmetical optimisation, but a political and contentious process in which the planner was at the
service of communities. For these communities were now recognised in the full richness
of their identities and cosmologies. The rationalities of the beneficiaries of planning
practices the poor, marginal, native, subaltern once the obstacle that had to be overcome by planners, are now not only celebrated but brought to the fore as the substance of
democratic and egalitarian processes of political transformation (Friedmann, 1973, 1987;
Grabow and Heskin, 1973; Holston, 2008; Sandercock, 1999). Here lies, at least in part,
the radicalness of the proposal: the political strength of oppressed communities resides
in their capacity to clash, sometimes violently, with the stabilised preconceptions and
principles of Western, male and White professionals.
This article, however, questions the political radicalness of radical planning. It questions the political effects resulting from celebrating lay and local knowledge as fundamentally different from expert and formal knowledge naturalising citizens as other to
experts. Epistemologically, the political radicalness of radical planning rests in the subversion of the arrangements by which the metis of communities is subjugated to the
episteme of experts and technicians (Scott, 1998). For radical planners, the political force
sustaining and informing real and long-term changes is this alter-knowledge the local,
informal, experiential knowledge mobilised by grass root and popular subjects and not
the abstract, formal and scientific knowledge mobilised by experts. But by deepening the
epistemic divide between lay communities and experts, radical planning, I claim, ends up
solidifying knowledge asymmetries, tacitly assuming that technical expertise resides in
and is monopolised by a select group of certified professionals and therefore hampering a truly radical reorganisation of public participation in planning contexts.
Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives that have emerged to contest
urban interventions in Santiago, Chile, I document how laypeople sometime with minimum financial and political resources challenge the knowledge practices and rationalities
of professional planners and government officials. But more importantly for my argument,
I also show how these grass root collectives weave political strategies that in practice prevent any epistemic distinction between us (non-expertsmetis) and them (expertsepisteme). More concretely, I identify three modes of technification organisational, epistemic
and generative. These are specific and differentiated strategies by which citizen collectives
become technical entities; that is, strategies in which citizen collectives retrieve their political strength not in Otherising by invoking the otherness of their position but, rather the
contrary, by reproducing and utilising experts arguments, techniques and grammars. In
these stories, the radicalness is thus not confined to the disrupting effect resulting from an
Other knowledge demanding political recognition, but is more profoundly related to the
political dislocations opening up when citizens rebel against a partition of the sensible
that purifies and allocates their roles as Others (Rancire, 2004). Instead of behaving as

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expected by their nature, as Rancire (2004) states, these citizens unmask the contingency of the expert/layperson or episteme/metis divide. In these stories then, citizens do not
search for their identities to be recognised; they attempt to undo a version of identity politics that ends up fixing and reducing their political affordances.
Theoretically, the article tries to enrich the conversation on radical planning and
participation by introducing some insights from Science and Technology Studies
(STS).1 As I will argue, some STS scholars have convincingly observed that the political complexity of sociotechnical controversies resides precisely in the fact that no purified allocation of expertise may be diagrammed and that instead expertise and
non-expertise, formality and informality, science and intuition, abstraction and experience, and episteme and metis are distributed among a range of emergent actors. The
figure of citizen collectives as anti-technical entities as mobilised by many postMarxists accounts is thus problematised.
In what follows, I briefly outline a theoretical framework to revisit the radical planning approach to public participation and civic engagement. Radical planning is a variegated and evolving field of research and action. In this succinct revision, I do not expect
to give a complete panorama of its complexity, but, even at the risk of simplification, to
highlight what seems to be some of its underlying epistemological principles. In the third
section, I turn to the empirical material to show how different citizen organisations (COs)
in Santiago became themselves expert and technical agents. It will be shown that far
from conforming to the conventional anti-technical figure, these organisations withstand
and challenge technocratic agencies by deploying a number of technology-based tactics
which I call modes of technification. In the final section, I draw some concluding
remarks regarding the challenges these hybrid epistemic situations open up for planning
practice and theory.

Unpacking expertise
On difference, or where is the radicalness of radical planning
Although radical planning both as a theory and as a planning practice has mutated and
expanded since its emergence in the late 1960s, some crucial epistemological principles
have remained in place, at least partially. Radical planning, as conceptualised by John
Friedmann (1987), can be minimally defined as the deliberate transfer of knowledge to
action in the public domain with the aim of social transformation. The emphasis on
action (over analytical distance) and transformation (over expert guidance) implies a
number of principles that disturb conventional planning practices. First, if real and sustainable transformations can only be achieved by the actors themselves, then the planners task is not to educate social collectives, nor even to advocate their objectives, but
to actively engage in their processes of political action. This implies, second, that planners and communities are imbricated in mutually beneficial processes of social learning
in which solutions and actions emerge dialogically. This also implies, third, that radical
planning emerges inevitably as a contentious challenge to state-led, formal and positivist
approaches to local planning planning, in other words, as resistance (Meth, 2010;
Miraftab and Wills, 2005). Last but not least, and crucial for the purposes of the

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arguments presented here, radical planning promotes a new epistemology in which the
knowledge of otherwise marginalised actors is front-staged to act as the driver of political activism and change.
Indeed, a basic premise of radical planning is the recognition of difference
understood both as an epistemic and ontological alterity as the vital force fuelling
political action. This position is thoroughly developed by Leonie Sandercock (2004),
one of the most prominent advocates of radical planning. For Sandercock (2004), it is
through the challenge posed to conventional cultural, political and social institutions
by often-oppressed identities not only of immigrants but of indigenous people,
African Americans, gays and lesbians (p. 436) that change emerges and expands. A
key assumption is hence that there is a fundamental divide, clearly visible, between
two heterogeneous although distinguishable and opposing groups: experts, professionals and technicians, usually identified with the state and framed within White, male
and scientific modes of knowing, on the one hand, and the multiple subaltern communities subjected to and marginalised by the dominant elites, on the other. The critical
objective of radical planning is to put forward a type of politics of recognition in which
the latter group is not dissolved or assimilated but acknowledged by the former. This
means a twofold movement by which difference is both identified and made politically
active: oppressed collectives should be engaged in both celebrating their cultural difference and demanding that it be acknowledged and respected (Sandercock, 2004:
436). There is, put differently, an incommensurable fracture between two clashing
worlds, and the task of radical planners is to highlight and to some extent expand
this tension by ensuring the political recognition of the subjugated party: Difference,
says Sandercock (2004), is not just to be tolerated but valorized, given value by the
dominant culture (p. 437).
Insurgent planning, a further development within the radical programme, although
mobilising a less romanticised conception of civil society, retains in many aspects the
assumption of an ontological difference fuelling urban politics. Indicative of this continuity is Holstons (2008) definition of insurgency as an opposition to the modernist
political project, and therefore as the political possibility of new and other sources
of citizenship rights, meanings, and practices. (p. 39). Here, again, the idea of an
Otherness, at odds with the modernist legalist, rationalist, science-based state,
emerges: on one side the modern state, on the other and opposed to it insurgent citizens, whose political salience resides in their will and capacity to parody, derail, or
subvert state agendas (p. 47). In their insurgent practices, and in the face of neoliberal
governments participatory turn, these citizens may deploy a mixture of political
manoeuvres, including their participation in formalised and normalised arenas and
debates (Miraftab, 2009). This participation, however, does not indicate an ontological
flexibility. Difference is not washed away, rather the contrary. Almost as a form of
sabotage, civil organisations have to participate in formal participatory spaces in order
to disrupt them and to reassert the ontological divide between themselves and the neoliberal state since to promote social transformation, insurgent planning has to disrupt the attempts of neoliberal governance to stabilise oppressive relationships through
inclusion (Miraftab, 2009: 41). In other words, while insurgent planning has evolved
from radical planning, adding new complexities to the simplified picture of clear-cut

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separation between experts and non-experts, the right to difference (Holston, 2008:
52) continues to be its ontological core.
The assumption of ontologically distinctive identities is politically instantiated and
applied via a further supposition: the fact, assumed by radical planners, that these
clashing collectives the subaltern and the dominant put forward different forms of
knowing and acting. And these forms are connatural, inherent and ontologically
inscribed. Reflecting on the dialogical relation between the planner and the community, Sandercock (2004) explains,
Planners bring to radical practice general and specific/substantive skills: everything from skills
of analysis and synthesis to grantsmanship, communication and the managing of group
processes, as well as specific knowledge of labor market or environmental law or transportation
modelling or housing regulation. But they also recognize the value of the contextual and
experiential knowledge that those in the front of local action the mobilized community
bring to the issue at hand. (p. 433)

The planner and the layperson can join their knowledges and skills in the search for a
common objective, precisely because they mobilise different types of abilities. One contributes with an episteme, and the other with a metis (Scott, 1998): on the one side, the
impersonal, cerebral and science-based knowledge that looks for objectivity and universalism; the collective, embodied and experiential know-how put forward in practical and
contextual situations, on the other. Marginalised or oppressed collectives do not have to
be forced to adopt technical and formalised knowing practices. Their political salience
depends on their capacity to front-stage their alternative epistemology, and the planners
role is therefore to recognise and expand this difference for political purposes. Confronted
by the grammar of statistics, technical instrumentality and legal reasoning, citizen collectives have to mobilise alternative registers, media and tools with the capacity to represent
the politics of difference in which they are engaged. In the words of Sandercock (2004),
radical planners ought to
celebrate the value of experiential and other alternative ways of knowing, learning, discovering,
including traditional ethnic or culturally specific modes: from talk to story telling, the blues to
rap, poetry and song; and visual representations, from cartoons to murals, painting and quilts.
(p. 436)

Dislocating the expert/non-expert divide with STS

The philosophical foundations of radical planning are embedded in what Barry (2001)
has called the anti-technological position: the principle, traditionally held by postMarxist thought, by which technology and technical knowledge is held as opposed to
civil society. The problem, as articulated by critical thinkers, resides in an Enlightenment
project that ended up subjecting substantive politics to techn, to technocracy and
Cartesian positivism, therefore segregating all forms of knowledge and action not aligned
with it. But STS, by investigating the situated mediation, articulation and performativity
of technoscientific devices and expertise, has convincingly argued that the technical and
the political, the episteme and the metis, and the scientific and the experiential are often

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entangled in complex networks of knowledge circulation and that in practice, clear-cut

divisions between the two poles are rarely found. Radical planning, therefore, could be
forcing an epistemic separation between two purified worlds that is not confirmed on the
ground.2
The split between the technical and the experiential, the formal and the informal, has
been empirically questioned by STS in at least three ways. First, STS has stressed the
heterogeneous nature of controversies affecting localities and communities. In any controversy affecting citizens a new urban development, the location of a dam, the closure
of a local hospital the stakes at play are always multiple, unstable and entwined, configuring complex assemblages of heterogeneous dimensions in which technical and nontechnical elements cannot be purified and separated. Put differently, none of these
controversies can be explained or solved by recourse to either technical or non-technical
arguments. The moral, political, technical, cultural and economic elements are so intricately enmeshed that actors, whichever position they defend, are forced to take into
account the multilayered affordances of controversies (Bijker, 1997; Callon, 1986;
Latour, 1988, 1996; Law, 1987, 2002).
Second, STS scholars have suggested that instead of having two polarised forms of
knowing, scientists and technicians often utilise experiential knowledge, while civic
groups often mobilise scientific claims and practices for their political objectives thus
rendering problematic the naturalisation of the expert/non-expert distinction. Ethnographic
studies within scientific laboratories (Knorr Cetina, 2005; Latour and Woolgar, 1986;
Lynch, 1985) revealed that scientists invest in practical, contextual, political and intuitive
work to create their scientific objects. Experts are not, then, agents with a type of rationality of a different kind, as postulated by Merton (1973): just as ordinary people, experts,
technicians and scientists rely on experiential and hands-on, practical knowledge in their
everyday doings.
Likewise, laypeople often utilise technical arguments and scientific knowledge,
particularly when engaging in complex sociotechnical controversies. In these situations, citizen collectives, in order to gain salience, may not only attune their argumentative styles to those of the official institutions or actors they denounce (Taylor, 2000;
Yearley, 2009). More profoundly, they often dislocate their epistemic identities: citizen
collective may engage in the production and dissemination of technical devices, evidences and arguments in spite of not having expert training. A paradigmatic case is the
role played by patient organisations in medical research, for example, in relation to
HIV (Epstein, 1995) or muscular dystrophy in France (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2008).
Through a number of practices lobbying, conducting independent research, communicating results patients, instead of playing the role of objects of scientific enquiry,
became active co-producers of the various treatments developed. Here, as with the
radical planning approach, there is a strong emancipatory element. But unlike radical
planning, in this case emancipation is not done via the celebration of the patients difference, but on the contrary, by dissolving the naturalised identity given to them
(Rancire, 2004).
Third, STS scholars have suggestively argued that the public sphere cannot be taken
as a space of disembodied abstraction. Instead, the public sphere is always technically

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mediated: the space of politics has to be produced, harnessed and conveyed. Politics, in
other words, is a fundamentally technical activity:
Whether in the public demonstrations of scientific experts at public inquiries, or the televisual
form of the studio debate or the investigative documentary, or the virtual architecture of
discussion groups on the Internet, there is always a technology to the public sphere. (Barry,
2001: 10)

Technology is not outside politics, but is an integral element of indeed a condition

of possibility for its performance. Public participation, for example, involves a number
of democratic technologies, even if these are as simple as chairs around a table and
everyday conventions of conversational turn taking (Girard and Stark, 2007: 151).
Demonstrations and protests, as well, require certain expertises and technological
arrangements (Barry, 2001), from megaphones (Rodrguez-Giralt etal., 2010) to artistic
interventions (Laurent, 2011).
Taken together, these three arguments suggest that the expert/non-expert divide cannot be taken for granted, and that in practice, different epistemic modalities connect,
hybridise and mesh. Drawing on these insights, I will analyse 12 COs involved in urban
controversies in Santiago, Chile. Based on ethnographic, interview and archive data, I
reconstruct their political tactics, organisational practices and discourse. The political
stories behind these cases are very much like those told in the radical planning scholarship. Indeed, these are stories about emancipation and the stubborn resistance of citizen
groups to being passively subjugated by state bodies, local governments and private
corporations. But unlike the radical planning literature, the emancipatory struggle of
these groups does not rely on the exaltation of their difference and the celebration of their
Otherness but on their active attempt to dilute any pre-established ontological and
epistemic divide between purified collectives. These are stories about COs who are not
trying to triumph by attacking technical knowledge and expert thinking, but by becoming
themselves technically literate and expert-based entities. I call modes of technification
the different way by which COs attempt at enacting a technical epistemic identity. More
specifically, I identify three of these modes: organisational, epistemic and generative.

The rise and changing nature of COs

A sprawled city of nearly 6 million inhabitants, Santiago has witnessed in the last two
decades an aggressive process of urban modernisation with the concomitant mushrooming of COs born in response to various types of urban interventions. It has been estimated
that at least 69 COs were actively engaged in urban controversies in 2009 (Tironi etal.,
2010). Although the existence of civic and territorial associations in the city is not a new
phenomenon, these COs are characterised by two novel and distinctive features. First,
they have gained a renewed capacity for political mobilisation. The redesigning of
Costanera Norte highway as the result of the opposition of neighbourhood in the mid1990s is usually marked as the beginning of a new breed of COs with political capacities
not previously encountered (Poduje, 2008). It has been estimated that since the early
2000s, COs have been successful in their demands in 67% of the cases (Poduje, 2008).

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Second, against the common wisdom associating these political collectives with NIMBY
(Not In My BackYard) groups, and thus with the interests of higher income groups, the
current emergence of COs in Santiago is significantly transversal, including groups from
different social classes (Tironi etal., 2010).
The success of COs should not eclipse the complex, and often discouraging, political
configuration within which COs have to operate. While Planes Reguladores, municipal
planning regulations, have a mandate for public participation each time they are actualised or reviewed, the quality, reach and political weight of these exercises is extremely
limited and weak. First, citizens and civil organisations are invited to participate only
when public and private projects have already been accepted for review. Second, public
consultations are not legally binding; thus, local authorities are not obliged to take into
account citizens observations and demands. And third, Planes Reguladores are provisioned with legal loopholes that allow the altering of community-sensitive urban regulations for example, building heights without having to go through public consultations
(Tironi etal., 2010).
Thus, COs have to mobilise resources both to push forward their demands and to open
new spaces for political action. Add to this the bureaucracy of Chilean local governments
and the economic power of the real estate private sector, and the result is the multiplication of controversies marked by different types of techno-political asymmetries. While
the description of this particular governance regime and power field would require more
space than this article can offer, the case of Acceso Sur can serve as a vivid example.
Fuelled by grand visions of a global, modern urban capital, post-Pinochet governments
have invested heavily in Santiagos transportation infrastructure since the early 1990s,
particularly in new urban highways (De Mattos, 1999; Fuentes and Sierralta, 2004;
Greene and Mora, 2005). In the late 1990s, a bid was launched to construct Acceso Sur,
the new southern access to Santiago. Works began in 1999. However, the project did not
include an environmental assessment and the highway was projected to run literally
metres away from several low-income communities in La Pintana and La Granja, among
the poorest municipalities in Chile. Without spaces or resources to voice their demands,
citizens spontaneously organised. Batalln Chacabuco, an all-women organisation led
by Susana Vzquez, was the most active. Batalln Chacabuco, through multiple on-site
interventions, media actions and, as we will see later, the mobilisation of legaltechnical
arguments, managed to stop the construction. The demand was a fair expropriation of all
housing units affected by the project. The Ministry of Public Works (MOP) dismissed the
proposal and, instead, approved in 2005 the payment by the private tender of $7,200,000
Chilean pesos (around 10,300) for the each of the housing units immediately facing the
highway. The solution was rejected by several COs, particularly by Batalln Chacabuco.
Their legal battle continued. Ignored by MOP engineers and architects, Batalln
Chacabuco enrolled other COs and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in search of
technical assistance. Finally, in 2009, after the intense efforts made by Batalln
Chacabuco to demonstrate the technical and legal inconsistency of the projects design,
MOP agreed to expropriate 237 housing units, paying to each owner $15,000,000 Chilean
pesos (approximately 21,500). Moreover, the project was redesigned to include mitigation infrastructure and green spaces. In 2011, 12 years after the beginning of the construction, the highway was completed.

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The case of Acceso Sur depicts to which extent technical expertise, power inequalities, statecraft practices, political articulations and technological arrangements are entangled in the urban controversies analysed here. A key question, however, remains, a
question related to how the political salience of Batalln Chacabuco should be read.
How a group of women from La Pintana, without any type of technical skills or political
networks, were able to triumph over the powerful MOP and redesign the layout of a
major infrastructural project? In this article, I rehearse an answer. I claim that instead of
expecting Batalln Chacabuco to mobilise a political strategy based on an Other nonscientific, non-formal, non-hegemonic knowledge, special attention has to be paid to
the technical capacities mobilised by this CO. To this end, during 2010 and 2011, I conducted interviews and ethnographic and archival research with 17 COs actively involved
in urban controversies in Santiago. The objectives were to describe their political tactics
and strategies, identify their discourses on democracy, urban planning and participation,
and to reconstruct their organisational structures. The stories presented here, therefore,
have to be taken cautiously: while they reveal crucial elements for a better understanding
of urban controversies, they are nonetheless stories about citizen collectives told by citizen collectives themselves. A complete vision of the political and cultural entanglements
constituting the issue at hand would require taking into account other agents, in heterogeneous positions and at different scales.
For the purposes of this article, I focus on 12 of these COs. Taken together, they represent the variegated nature of citizen collectives in Santiago: involved in issues ranging
from garbage recollection to heritage conservation and planning regulation, and operating from both the poorest and the wealthiest municipalities in Santiago, these COs represent everything but a monolithic and homogeneous phenomenon (see Table 1).
In what follows, I describe how these COs have become technical entities engaging in
what I call modes of technification.

Modes of technification
We have several commissions: organisational mode of technification
State technicians and radical planners share, unwittingly, a similar vision of COs: they
both agree that COs do not comply with rationalistic organisational principles. Radical
planners celebrate this mismatch, arguing that if a new epistemology is to be assembled,
civil collectives should embrace alternative forms of organising knowledge and labour
(Friedmann, 1987). Politicians and state technicians often caricature COs as passionate
collectives moved by the irrational impetus of the cause rather than by technically adjusted
considerations. It is not then that COs should not be constituted as rational, instrumental
organisations, it is that they cannot. This is, for instance, what Pedro Sabat, mayor of an
important municipality in Santiago, tried to communicate quite successfully when he
called the members of a local CO a bunch of louts and a fanatic group (Baeza, 2010):
COs are passionate but lack cold rationality, and hence it is impossible for them to form
rational and systematic organisations.
But when examined from the ground, COs can hardly be labelled as irrational or
unstructured. These organisations often operate as entities that take to the extreme the

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Table 1. Citizen organisations (COs) studied.

Name of CO

Object of controversy

Urban context

Defendamos La
Pintana

Environmental
degradation and
planning regulation
Garbage recollection

Organisation from La Pintana, one of the

poorest neighbourhood in Chile

Vecinos por la
defensa del barrio
Yungay
No a la destruccin
de Av. Matta
Asociacin de
locatarios de La
Vega
Pedro de Valdivia
Norte
Ciudad Viva
Defendamos la
Ciudad
Red Ciudadana de
uoa
Salvemos Vitacura

Construction of
transit corridor
Construction of new
produce market
Construction of
Costanera Norte
highway
Construction of
Costanera Norte
highway
Construction of
parking lot below
square
Planning regulation
Planning regulation

Vecinos de Villa
Portales

Heritage conservation

Acceso Sur

Construction of
highway and planning
regulation
Environmental
conservation

Comunidad
Ecolgica

Organisation from Yungay, low-income

and heritage neighbourhood in Santiagos
historic district
Organisation from Av. Matta, low-income
and heritage neighbourhood in Santiagos
historic district
Association of small retailers of La Vega,
popular produce market
Organisation from Pedro de Valdivia
Norte, upper-class neighbourhood in
northeast Santiago
Organisation from Bellavista, middle-class
and heritage neighbourhood in Santiagos
historic district
Organisation from Las Condes, upperclass municipality in northeast Santiago
Organisation from uoa, upper-class
municipality in central Santiago
Organisation from Vitacura, upper-class
municipality in northeast Santiago
Organisation from Villa Portales, a
heritage housing complex located
in Estacin Central, a low-income
municipality in Santiagos historic district
Organisation from La Pintana, one of the
poorest municipalities in Chile
Organisation from Comunidad Ecolgica,
a sustainable residential project in
Pealoln, a mixed municipality in
southeast Santiago

Source: Author.

rationality and the kind of expertise over which technicians claim to have a monopoly.
This becomes evident when the internal organisation of these associations is analysed.
We have several commissions, explains the leader of Salvemos Vitacura, Rodolfo
Terrazas, in an interview, Legal, programmatic, publicity and communications, strategy
design, and finance. The COs studied are not established as an inorganic and fragmented
handful of militants, as shown by the case of Salvemos Vitacura, quite the opposite. They

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are structured in sophisticated technical divisions of labour. In fact, out of the 17 organisations studied, 10 are structured on the basis of at least three organisational levels: (a) a
formal, openly elected governing body with a representative structure, (b) the level of
leaders, either elected or designated on a territorial basis and (c) issue-based
commissions.
The latter are of special interest. COs have their own experts, who specialise in different areas of the controversy (legal, urban planning, communications, finance, etc.).
These experts collect evidence, hold technical meetings with government and private
agents, and contact neighbourhood professionals. The CO of Villa Portales in the lowincome neighbourhood of Estacin Central, for example, has different expert commissions. In the CO around Pedro de Valdivia Norte, in the wealthier east end of Santiago,
many members render professional services in lieu of paying their membership dues.
The same holds true for Salvemos Vitacura, where a technical commission on urban
planning has enrolled well-known architects who live in the neighbourhood. Vecinos por
la Defensa del Barrio Yungay employs a similar mechanism: as one of the leaders tells
us when she explains their funding strategies, we rarely charge monthly dues dues
are paid in the form of work; for example, there are many professionals, and they contribute through their professions. Sometimes these technical commissions or leaders
resort to external advisors. The resident of Barrio Dalmacia hired lawyers specialised in
heritage issues, while the Asociacin de Locatarios de La Vega obtained the advice from
experts in urban planning and transportation.
Obviously not all COs have similar human capital available in their territories or
comparable capacities to hire them when they are locally unobtainable. But interestingly,
if COs lack endogenous expertise and cannot hire external advisors, they obtain expert
advice by turning to their peers.
Interorganisational collaboration is indeed extremely common among these organisations. And importantly, besides knowing each other (weak ties, thin line in Figure 1),
many COs help, collaborate and supply expert advice to each other (strong ties, thick line
in Figure 1). That is, they have articulated a complex distributed network of cooperation
and knowledge sharing. One member of No a la Destruccin de Av. Matta exemplifies
the collaborative links between COs:
Most [members of No a la Destruccin de Av. Matta] live in the area, but we have the outside
help of Barrio Yungay and Barrio Dalmacia and Ciudad Viva We are working in our own
territories, but we also get together with people who have similar interests and problems.

Additionally, some COs are members of the Coordinadora Metropolitana de

Organizaciones Ciudadanas Territoriales, a meta-organisation that serves as a lobbying
space for COs. Other COs for example, Defendamos la Ciudad, Defendamos La
Pintana and Red Ciudadana de uoa meet on a regular basis to share information,
help each other and agree on collective actions. Patricio Herman, president of Defendamos
la Ciudad, has rendered legal advice to the Red Ciudadana de uoa, to the Coordinadora
Vecinal La Reina and to Defendamos Las Lilas in Santiago, and to a number of COs in
Via del Mar, Valparaso, Quilpu, Puchuncav, Maintencillo and Coyhaique. Similarly,
several COs have approached Salvemos Vitacura to solicit expert advice on the legal
steps required to bring about a referendum in their respective municipalities.

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Figure 1. Interorganisational collaboration network.

Source: Author.

COs, in brief, are not lay organisations mobilising a different type of organisational
strategy. COs exhibit highly complex and strategic organisational routines. They have
indeed replicated what is commonly thought as bureaucratic, rational and compartmentalised organisational structures, based on expert knowledge and technical divisions of
labour. In this sense, COs execute an organisational mode of technification: they become
technical entities by assimilating technical expertise in the organisational field and not
by contesting them in the name of epistemic differences. This includes the capacity to
search for outside help when technical skills are not available in the immediate environment. COs, aligned with broader trends in management, are increasingly turning to networked organisational structures. Rather than contesting these organisational logics,
COs embrace technical and organisational know-how in their quest.

We had to either learn fast, or be razed: Epistemic mode of

technification
COs success, however, cannot be explained solely by their capacity to mobilise expert
organisational schemes. As it is well demonstrated in the literature on social movements
(Snow etal., 1986), success also depends on their ability to magnify their causes, frames
and problematisations. Leonie Sandercock (2004), indeed, argues that radical planning
should celebrate, recognise and put forward new media for political action, from talk to

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story telling, the blues to rap, poetry and song; and visual representations, from cartoons
to murals, painting and quilts (p. 436).
In contrast, COs in Santiago seem to prefer more mainstream tools and to debate
within more traditional political arenas. In fact, crucial to COs political modus operandi
is their intensive use of national newspapers to mobilise their demands. Since the late
1990s, La Nacin and El Mercurio, two leading national newspapers, have published
234 columns and letters to the editor written by leaders of the COs under study (160 in
La Nacin and 74 in El Mercurio).
For the purposes of this article, a total of 26 letters to the editor written by COs and
published in El Mercurio since 2003 were analysed. Insofar they are one of the easiest
ways for citizen groups with few economic and political resources to access high-impact
media, letters to the editor are an interesting topic for sociological research on social
movements (Hoffman and Slater, 2007; Perrin and Vaisey, 2008; Richardson and
Franklin, 2003).
What do COs letters to the editor say? With the exception of two cases, all the letters
pose methodological discussions. That is, they concentrate on finding the legal loopholes, financial mistakes or institutional gaps present in the arguments of municipalities,
ministries or property developers. Put differently, the framework of the debate and the
grammar of the battle, as defined by expert bodies, are accepted. The letters do not delve
into an epistemological dispute about the knowledges mobilised or an ontological challenge over the objects of the controversy. The debate put forward by COs focuses on
technicians misreadings of data and their deficient application of the regulations. That is
to say, COs shape the conflict as a discussion between two technical entities rather than
as a tug-of-war between opposing rationalities. This is the second mode of technification, which we will call an epistemic mode of technification: COs become technical
entities by accepting the rules of the game, assimilating the epistemic logic of their
opponents and arguing against the official actors views on a technical basis not by
Othering their argumentative position. For example, in a letter sent in January 2007,
Salvemos Vitacura explains their political strategy as follows:
The referendum, therefore, became the only viable alternative for exercising citizen
participation, pursuant to the rights stipulated in the Constitution and in the Organic
Constitutional Law on Municipalities, which entitles citizens to amend the Communal Master
Plan.

Salvemos Vitacura neither proposes to redefine the controversy in alternative terms

nor to attack the inherent epistemology of the technical debate by proposing a new one;
Salvemos Vitacura does not rely on an externalist criticism. Salvemos Vitacura is not
challenging the government in ideological terms; the letter is not intended to unveil the
positivist or technocratic rationale fuelling the municipalitys actions. What it does,
rather, is to technically challenge the credibility of the knowledge mobilised by municipal and ministerial technicians and to criticise their mistaken reading of urban planning
regulations. In other words, it shows government experts how to properly interpret the
written law.

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Interestingly, the epistemic alignment to the technical grammars of government officials and private corporations cannot be reduced to the availability of these skills within
wealthier COs neighbourhoods. A member of Vecinos por la Defensa del Barrio Yungay
puts an alternative explanation forward:
We used to fight against the Chilean Construction Chamber, against ministries and the
authorities, [but] it was a totally unequal battle We did not know what a Master Plan was, or
what the monuments law was; then, we had two alternatives, either to learn fast, or be razed,
and we learned so fast that now we are capable of setting up a regional school where we teach
other organisations.

Given the deep inequalities and poor technical preparation, COs only chance of survival in the public arena without being razed by the technical machineries is to master
and execute technical expertise. The barriers to enter the urban planning debate are so
strong and deeply rooted that, without basic technical knowledge, an organisation has no
chance of participating. This is connected with the symbolic violence exerted by technicians, who waive their technical status to patronise lower income communities and
organisations. But here, again, the response of COs is not to counter-attack such violence
resorting to an epistemic and identity difference. On the contrary, COs have identified
that the only way out of such violence is to share these codes, as a leader of Acceso Sur
states:
The government has a very special way of fighting with [community] leaders. First, they speak
their own language. On the technical part they know about codes, plans, all that. So when you
prepare yourself and they hand over a plan to you and you can read it, they get when you
mention specific codes of laws, they are at a loss, and that was what triggered the respect they
have for the community [Acceso Sur], because now they are speaking with leaders who are
[technically] trained, just like they are.

In short, COs, in their search for emancipation and respect, apply the same rationalities and the same epistemic frames as their counterparts. Therefore, municipal and ministerial technicians are not faced with an other who mobilises alternative epistemologies
and worldviews, but rather with a peer who executes similar expert competencies.

No issue, no politics: generative mode of technification

In her reflections about public involvement in sociotechnical controversies, Noortje
Marres (2007) points out that the creation of publics cannot be separated from the definition of issues. While publics only emerge as such when they articulate issues, the latter
require to be mobilised by the former in order to emerge. This, according to Marres, is
the key to understand the democratic potential of citizen participation: without an issue,
there is no public, and without a public, there is no democracy.
Indeed, the success of COs depends not only on their ability to attack their ministerial
or municipal counterparts but significantly on their capacities to articulate issues and to
position themselves in the debate. But the ability to sparkle issues into being is not a
given. It requires a certain strategic and technical proficiency: to be able to purposively

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target specific objects, utilising ad hoc arguments in particular arenas, in order to publicly problematise them. This entails political savvy, but also highly expert skills relevant
to the media industry, the technical aspects of the controversy and, increasingly, the use
of social networking technologies (Garrett, 2006).
One of the main objectives of COs letters to the editor is, in fact, to re-problematise
controversial objects. This allow for the introduction of new issues that then become the
palimpsest over which COs demonstrate their technical expertise and contest, on technical grounds, government and corporate technocrats. Or put differently, COs became
technical entities by deploying expert-driven arguments; but these arguments are not
only targeted at debating a clearly identified matter of concern but also and critically
at demonstrating the manifold technical facets that technocratic entities overlooked or
denied in their calculations. COs enrich the technicality of issues under debate, opening
new avenues of contestation. If experts are normally the ones revealing to laypersons
how simple and naive their judgments are (Bell, 1991 [1977]), in this case COs are the
ones educating experts about the technical complexities of the world. Insofar as COs
become expert producers of new technical issues to be debated, I call this the third way
of becoming a technical entity, the generative mode of technification.
The letters to the editor sent by COs allow us to observe what the objects of their
arguments are, and what becomes clear is that the letters do not intend to defend particularistic trenches but, and above all, to create what could be labelled as an atmosphere of concern: a political environment in which technical uncertainties
proliferate.
While many of these letters deal with the controversy that directly affects the CO writing the letter, they frequently also deal with other controversies. Figure 2 illustrates this
situation. The content of the letters and columns written by COs refers to a multiplicity
of objects: problematising other entities involved in the urban planning processes such as
municipalities, estate developers, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and, generally, the regulatory legal framework. The case of Defendamos la Ciudad is emblematic: rather than advocating for their own demands, Defendamos la Ciudad regularly
resort to technical and legal arguments to transform the Chilean Construction Chamber,
the Municipality of Las Condes, the Regional Metropolitan Council and the National
Environmental Commission into matters of concern.
By creating this atmosphere of concern in which technical critique exceeds the
boundaries of particularistic demands, COs strengthen what I called the organisational
mode of technification: the collaborative network articulated by COs is sustained and
expanded. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, COs overflow the technical
parameters set by government and corporate technocrats. Experts delimit the controversies, COs open up their borders; experts establish relationships and determine the
institutions involved, COs problematise them. This overflowing, however, does not
rest on a form of subaltern knowledge or alternative framing, but on the enhanced
technical capabilities of COs. The crucial point of this generative mode of technification is that COs are formative entities: they produce and promote new technical debates
over urban regulations, the real estate industry and environmental mitigations. COs are
not bounded to the expert debates defined by technocrats; they also help define emerging knowledge controversies.

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Figure 2. Objects of letters to the editor (circular nodes: senders; square nodes: recipients;
recipients in circle: recipient/sender match).
Source: Author.

Conclusions: from experts to processes of expertisation

In his notable book Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local
Knowledge, Frank Fischer (2000) proposes to re-assess the notion of the expert. For
him the problem is that Insofar as experts understand or treat the essence of policy to
be its technical core, as do most conventional policy analysts, the citizens input will
remain a secondary, inferior contribution to policy deliberation (p. 42, emphasis added).
The solution, for Fischer, thus resides in the possibility to re-politicise the expert debate;
this is to eliminate the positivist assumption about a value-neutral science and to reintroduce the values brought in by citizens into the technical debate. The argument,
Fischer (2000) states, is not that citizens should involve themselves in the technical
issues of science The primary issue is more a matter of the experts finding ways to
relate their technical practices to public discourses (p. 45, emphasis added).
In this article, I have suggested otherwise. The community organisations studied
here do want to engage in technical issues of science and they do believe, as well, that
the essence of policy is its technical core. Indeed, in this article I have attempted to
show that COs, in their quest for political recognition and autonomy, do not resort to
anti-technological strategies based on the assumption of an ontological and epistemic
difference between experts and non-experts, technocrats and citizens, the hegemonic
and the subaltern. On the contrary, they embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, technical,

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formal and instrumental knowledge, tools, media, tactics and arenas as a way to succeed
in their political struggles. They accomplish their goals not by being the Other to technocracy, but by becoming technical entities themselves. This is done, I claim, in at least
three different ways: by structuring their organisations based on functional and expertdriven principles, by attacking technical dispositions with further technical arguments
and by generating new technical zones of conflict. Thus, COs in Santiago echo Fischers
call to re-politicize the expert debate but only if re-politicization is not defined as the
minimisation of the technical in the technical debate, but as the technical problematisation of it.
How are we to understand this epistemic redistribution? The broad lesson of this story
is that technical expertise cannot be understood as an inherent cognitive trait, but as an
affordance brought into being along circuits of expertisation, as a fleeting, mobile and
porous condition. Agents are not experts in principle: they become so through heterogeneous means some via college training utilising their own cognitive skills, while others
self-educate themselves and tap into networked knowledge in a variety of ways including organisational, epistemic and generative modalities. Put differently, technical expertise is enacted through a processes of qualification (Callon etal., 2002) which is not
regulated by any of the actors involved in a controversy, but rather determined by the
trajectory of the object(s) under scrutiny and the expansion of the controversy which
triggers the catalysts of epistemic and political circuits defining the qualification of the
expert. It was the nature of the ill-designed highway, together with the characteristics of
the Chilean public sphere, which triggered a particular process of expertisation that
resulted in the qualification of a group of low-income women as legal and planning
experts. Expertise is not a zero-sum game; it is not located here or there, but it is distributed among manifold agents and is performed in variegated forms and sites.
These findings have a number of implications for planning, and particularly for the
radical planning project. In the face of ever-growing inequalities and democratic challenges, the emancipatory project of radical planning is still very much needed. But, to
this end, its radicalness must be revisited and expanded. Otherwise radical planning
could end up enacting a Cartesian world in which identities are essentially defined and
roles forcefully allocated. The celebration of multiplicity of identities, knowledges,
practices and ways of being cannot be done at the cost of creating fixed, immutable and
purified actors, doomed to reproduced ad eternum a given and connatural epistemology.
Insofar as technical expertise is not an immanent feature that can be easily located in
specific actors, this article suggests that radical planners should confront a much more
complex political context than it is usually accustomed to. In order to be fully radical,
radical planning has to include a flexible ontology in which there are not only multiple
identities, but also where any one identity can be potentially re-composed, re-invented or
re-articulated. It is in this openness, this article proposes, where emancipation and
democracy reside.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Nicols Somma, Ivn Poduje and Gloria Yez and three anonymous reviewers
for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

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Funding
This article is based on fieldwork funded by the Centro de Polticas Pblicas (2010), Pontificia
Universidad Catlica de Chile and the Center for Sustainable Urban Development/FONDAP
15110020.

Notes
1. While conversations between urban studies and science and technology studies (STS), and
actornetwork theory and complexity theory have been already rehearsed (Aibar and Bijker,
1997; Boelens, 2010; Faras and Bender, 2009; Rydin, 2013; Smith, 2003), these have largely
engaged with how to elaborate more rhizomatic accounts of the urban and more symmetric
inclusions of non-humans into planning. A specific focus on public participation and processes of expertisation is still lacking.
2. Although from a different perspective, postcolonial and subaltern studies have articulated a
similar critique (Chakrabarty, 2000; Guha, 1997). Appadurai (1996), for example, has convincingly argued that insofar as contemporary cultures and economies are entangled with and
criss-crossed by global and fluctuating circuits of meaning, practices and knowledge, modern dichotomies sustaining the Western world cannot be sustained anymore, and identities
have to be approached as liquid and ever-changing moments within larger techno-political
trajectories.

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Author biography
Manuel Tironi is assistant professor in the Instituto de Sociologa at Pontificia Universidad Catlica
de Chile. His research concerns envirotech controversies, disasters public participation and expertise. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Innovation and Social
Process at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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