...

is a process, but neither one of

incrementalism nor equilibrium, nor
an arrival at a “settled” ideal state.
It utilises theories not as models but
simply as tools for experimentations. It
admits conflicts, and proceeds with strife
as productive. It produces potentials,
even indescribable ones, to expand a
plan’s spatial-conceptual territories.

INCOMPLETE 1

PLANNING

Various textual-conceptual vignettes and

diagrams follow from here to serve as
platforms to create Incomplete Planning..

An Incomplete Plan
 Palimpsest

H ow does a plan embrace the emergence of

indescribable communities and territories?
Yet, the palimpsest is never an inverse masterplan.
It refrains from being another master narrative. It
splinters into innumerable potentials. Proliferation
This question presents a contradiction: It demands does not rely on binary oppositions.
planning yet refuses to describe the people and
territories. Is it not planning’s role to extrapolate In-completing the masterplan, the palimpsest presses
from current land-surveys, urban forms, socio- the masterplan’s ethical form to (in)completion.
cultural assets, incomes, social mores, education
standard, preferred transport modes, economic
trends, aspirations, even biases and fears to
forecast physical and social infrastructures?

This contradiction can be temporarily suspended if

a plan’s body and function is recast as a palimpsest
that challenges the permanence of urban policies,
but not discarding them altogether. This palimpsest
2 lies beneath and alongside, burrowing in the
crevices and epi(stem)e of an official plan. It can be
elusive in its precise form - almost subterranean -
but still forceful with its spatio-ethical project.

... an other plan.

This palimpsest breaks fissures in the masterplan’s

well-tempered strata to decompose official values,
policies and typologies, even history. Unlike a
conventional plan that tells history as a progression
to salvation, the palimpsest treats history as
material for new compositions rather than models.
Fragmented values, policies, histories, mores,
typologies and spaces marry alien concepts and forces.
These unions lay the platforms from which those yet-
described territories and peoples may take place.
In tracing layered territories, enclosures and interiors are just
passages which movements have slowed down.

An Incomplete Plan
 In Medias Where?

C urious is the middle. Yet, a city is often said to

be in the middle of thing, where is the middle?
inability to wholly represent this “in the middle of
where” (missing middle) does not mean it is a lack or
negative-space. Its presence is its potentialities.
A city is always between two or more other
territories. For example, gateway cities like Hong A city is a shifting field rather than an object (e.g. smart
Kong, Singapore, Vancouver or Dubrovnik, which city, happy city, etc.), more topological than typological.
span between the Occident and the Orient. But, And, more than defined Cartesian geometries., this
herein lies the impossibility of representing field can also be composed of senses that are not
this spanning in time. What is the gateway city’s immediately spatial: inklings and pulsations of potential
interiority, if both the Oriental and Occidental are trajectories. A topology that folds in and produces
shifting territories, and are themselves spanned varied spatio-temporalities and senses.
between yet other spaces? Insofar as space itself is
always moving, the “middle” is always out of joint or Even a map drawn to the minutest details does not
missing from its own location. represent a city’s utmost interiority – it is a missing
middle. Even the future, which is supposedly of our
Still, one asks: How to plan for a missing middle? making, cannot be articulated wholly as the future
Acknowledging the middle is out of joint with splinters from its own present. 3
itself ! The task may be to move along those forces
animating the shifting middle. Working with these The inability for representation to wholly determine
moving forces and traces needs more than static this out of joint middle arouses anxieties.
atemporal representations. Create “para-planning
contraptions” that draws intricately from a city’s Anxiety exhausts. Yet, sometimes it is the drive to
movements: Kinetic machines woven from the city; carry on experimenting with (mis/re)-presentations.
multiscalar maps which can even exist with the Exhaustion are moments when forces slow to an
space it maps (a doubling); interior voids standing as imperceptible crawl to regather, secretly swelling
positive volumes; etc. with other subjects, landscapes, economies, ecologies,
and even vegetation.
Mapping is not just records of movements.
Mapping generates movements. Maybe the middle is not missing. It is our
misconception of the middle as a centre-point that is
What is planning’s locus in this exercise? It is its a deceit. The middle is a relation more than type. It
ability to sustain vectors and vibrations in order to is not that Planning has no interiority. The interior
shift the city and “Planning” itself. Plan with/in the is all there. Planning and the city are immersed in
Centres, middles and interiors are distributed middle. More than representation, it is a mode of each other. Their intertwined interiors are becoming
not between points, but vibrating fields acting-thinking reflexively and creatively. And, the exteriors.

01 03 02

An Incomplete Plan
 Again and Again, A Joy

W hat if a force was to steal into our minds

asking: Would we dare to devise a plan which
inscribes its own undoing? If so, what strengthens us
There is joy in inventing again and again, but not
a joy derived from being rewarded because one
has satisfied the metrics that determines how life
to bear this undoing again and again? should perform. Rather, it is a joy emerging from
experiments leading to creations: philopoiesis.
This question affirms the constant remaking of It is a joy of acting by one’s own accord; not to
subjects and territories as life’s movement – life’s say “free-will” but without dictated by external
nature! Further, if Planning is part of life, it is to demands. Joyfulness may be said to be being in a
find courage to love this remaking without zenith situation where the forces abound lead to creation
as Planning’s fate – returning day after day, even of new relations and thus possible new concepts,
in the next life, to embrace a plan which form is peoples and spaces. In other words, an elation not
its “unformedness”. And, to do so despite knowing begun with limiting molds or schemas.
this movement strives for strife, rather than quell
strife. Conflicting territories are no less ethical than Are we bold enough to affirm joy from the natural
equilibrium states or shared abodes. and unnatural conflicts that constitutes a city’s
recurrence through difference?
4 Replanning a plan over and over is not tending
toward a perfect city or the truth of life’s conduct.
Each take is not to incrementally better our
regulatory framework so as to more successfully
implement the same values (even ones claiming the
Common Good). Of note, incrementalism via testing
tolerances in order to resolve strife or settle for a
happy middle still suggests a longing for an ideal
end-state. The “better” is taken as one step closer to
the “best”, the completed.

“Again and again” is a motion of (re)-bundling

different sets of texts, imagery and sounds. At
each recurrence, to craft new values and more
importantly even valuation systems – Invention
of new ethics rather than subscription to common
social mores.
A love of fate is to embark on many returns, each time
a new instance. It is a matter of returning to creation;
an art of transfiguration

04 05 06

An Incomplete Plan
 What can Theory do?

M ake theory be in a flight from itself. of texts, concepts, diagrams and sounds drawn from
the city. A theoretical text may even start to disobey
the convention of putting forth a thesis then proving
“Theory” comes from theoria: to survey, contemplate it. Theory-production is not just “writing”. Its form
and speculate by a figure standing apart from the can be amidst many media (mediums/middles).
world’s affairs. Unless one believes in deities, this The theoretical text’s body is site for exchange and
lonely figure is impossible. Even if deities exist, are creation, not just a container of static concepts.
they not stardust too, engaging in carnal-material
relations with the earth? Theory has a materiality.

Theory is never written in isolation without the A question about theory’s form is also a question
matter of the world. Theorists are always in milieus, of what it can do? Theory is like a hammer; itself
amidst questions and never above it all asking the never a model but provides a particular gathering of
questions. Questions may very well be thrust into materials and conditions (e.g. metal heavy enough
theorists to unsettle their well-formed strata. to swing forcefully) to create new things. So, those
constellations of texts, concepts, and diagrams in a
In Planning, “thinking” (one may suggest theoretical text await (like an not-yet-used hammer) 5
“theorisation”) is at least partly composed from encounters with a specific use - perhaps to intercept
the streets, design-charrettes, public consultations, another masterplan. We (e.g. built environment
the drawings made in groups and privately, professionals) can use those constellations to draw
generations of photographs, and of course concepts up other constellations of texts, concepts, and
from theoretical texts pulled in for a particular diagrams. What theory can do is to offer itself as a
project. Theorising the city is experimenting with material for a city’s un/redoing. What theory can do
drawing new relations amongst the physical, socio- depends on the intersections it encounters and uses
economic, conceptual, geological, historical and it developed for. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze
spatial forces vested in a given project’s borders. suggested this about theory:
Working in this mode, theory is not anterior to what
is conventionally called “practice”; practice is not A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing
subjugated to being copies of a theoretical model. to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must
function. And not for itself.
What then is theory’s form? For Planning, theory
Points, concepts proliferate. One may is one substance with the city and that “business” But more than making other new things, theory is
even curate things. But it is to recognise Planners conduct. This is because theory can be more always in a flight from itself in that it remakes its
between even just two points there can
be many points, tones, rising and falling than a model that dictates a city’s form. Rather, a own groupings of concepts... always tasked with is
tones, concepts as a glissando theory’s body can be approached as a constellation own in-completion.

08 07

An Incomplete Plan
 Completing the Incomplete

I ncomplete plans are not difficult to do. On

a building-scale, there are half-filled houses
which future inhabitants can complete by putting
• An Incomplete Plan is not a masterplan’s inverse,
espousing an opposite standard.
• An Incomplete Plan pierces a masterplan’s
Gilles Deleuze wrote,

Something in the world forces us to

in their own interior walls and roofs. On a well-composed layers and unsettles them into think. This something is an object not of
neighbourhood scale, approximate massing and “disassemblies” bearing unchartable potentials. recognition, but a fundamental encounter.
land-use are illustrated with typologies. Subsequent • An Incomplete Plan picks up these disassemblies, What is encountered may be Socrates, a
stakeholders (developers, designers, community joins them with other things - make new temple, or a demon. It may be grasped in
panelists, politicians, and neighbours) through connections that can become tools, diagrams and a range of affective tones: wonder, love,
workshops and city council hearings work out the platforms for the emergence of new subjectivities, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its
individual buildings’ details. In the first example, spaces, voices and ethics. primary characteristic is that it can only
the interior walls are limited by the exterior walls. • An Incomplete Plan is a movement of both be sensed.
In the second example, an individual building may materials and concepts, more than a guarded set
step a little lower on one area to better transition of principles and objects. It is a tool. Thinking amidst experimentation, if one
to the lower scale surrounds, but it seldom veers • An Incomplete Plan transforms itself as it is thoroughly folded in the experiment-
from its intended massing, the ideal model. In both interacts and transforms with the masterplan. The event itself, ensues anxieties. One builds
cases, customisation proceeds by known pre-sets. masterplan is a worthy adversary. a Pandora Box which inside acquires its
6 Incomplete plans are not hard if the end is envisioned own forces and logic. The inside becomes
... at best an amorphous gathering of disjointed and an yet-known expanding outside. Still,
Although apt at planning the incomplete as a contradictory texts, images, activities and sounds. one ‘copes’ (but certainly not sublimate)
finished product, seldom do we ask what constitutes Contradictions and disjoints do not just express the through the creation of new relations,
“Incomplete Planning”. strife present today, but embodies the conflictual amidst the anxious field.
forces necessary to spur the emergence of future
Incomplete Planning does not mean giving up and peoples and spaces couched in difference. Again, these The unsettled mind-body propels itself
letting the market take over. (To do so is in fact tools, platforms and diagrams are not representations and forces tied to it (those forces making
planning-by-pro forma common in late capitalism of people and spaces of the future. They are the the city) to new grounds. It is not a
where the end is well mapped out catering to the fields for yet-expressed potentials to form. rejection of ground, but reaffirming
“proper” urbanites, condominiums, and government.) ground is ground-ing.
Deliberate disjointedness forces us to operate
To further proceed with forming a stage for beyond merely recognising the same patterns. Completing the Incomplete, or Incompleting
incompleteness, a few points may be discussed: Détournement. It is no longer applying tried the Complete is the same movement. The
typologies and best practices to the city. Thought incomplete plan is complete insofar as
here may not even be immediately imageable. constant movement is its very form.
Thought is as much sensation as it is logic. ...

09 10 11

An Incomplete Plan
 Curation

T he tools, platforms and diagrams that

facilitate the emergence of people and
spaces of the future are not arbitrarily assembled.
Curation is necessary to not let the project swerve
into absolute chaos from which it is not possible
to generate impacts on the masterplan. This is
why elsewhere in this text there is the suggestion
that the Incomplete Plan’s material is to come, at
least partially, from the disassembled body of the
masterplan. The masterplan lends the theme, but
it no longer defines the directions.

Knowing what to include / exclude, when to do so,

and how to present them, is where planning comes
in. It is not to curtail potentials, but to ensure
potentials (even as inklings and senses) can affect
pressing issues. 7

To curate is to explore ways to create a

multiplicity of possibilities even between the
simplest two things.

Subterranean forces pierce the well-composed layers of a master(narrative)

plan, unsettling territories to build platforms for new territories to form

An Incomplete Plan
 Notes

01 The term “Missing Middle” used here partly draws from the 04 The question posed in this present text is inspired by Friedrich 05 Geographer John Pløger following philosopher Chantal Mouffe
term’s increasing frequency in Western planning and design circles. Nietzsche’s key questions about whether one loves and embraces his/ argues that the notion that a planning program must result in consensus
(See: [Link] At face-value, the “Missing her life enough to be able to declare s/he will make those same decisions actually suppresses the nature of politics and democracy itself in that
Middle” is straightforward: It townhouse-like in scale and form, and again and again. Nietzsche asked, this nature is one expressed by necessary strife and conflict. Instead
sits between a single-family house and a six-storey apartment. It is of treating difference from the status quo as antagonisms that must
envisioned to supply what planning pundits call “gentle density” What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your be quelled, one may treat them as “agonisms” which entails a certain
while serving some factions of Western society’s perceived preference loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and respect for competing visions, discourses and values.
for ground-oriented housing. But, the purpose of using this term in have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
this present text is not to better define the “Missing Middle” building more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every The indefinite struggle between parties does not have to lead to
typology. Rather, it draws various spatio-conceptual forces from the joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or synthesis, it is seen as leading to opportunities where one is transformed
term to begin other explorations. For instance, what other limits are great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession together with one’s opponent. Hence, “to see democracy as agonism
used to define this particular middle besides the typological limits of the and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, means to go beyond the friend-enemy thinking, and seeing the
house and apartment? and even this moment I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is participant one heavily disagrees with or does not understand, as an
turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust. adversary one can learn something from. This does not require the
negligence of interests and power-mechanisms, but the need to respect
02
The more one engages with these shifting forces – adding and On the surface, this question seems to suggest life will definitely repeat differences and disagreements radically.”
subtracting forces, twisting relations – the more one stutters wondering again and again, and whether we will embrace it. But the question, on John Pløger, “Strife: Urban Planning and Agonism,” Planning Theory
anxiously what can be next. One enters what philosopher Gilles Deleuze closer inspection, may be less one about embracing temporal recurrence. vol. 3, no. 1 (2004), pp. 71-92.
calls a “Zone of Vibration” where ‘ideas bifurcate and vary in each For Nietzsche, temporality does not repeat itself. The question may be
of its own terms, following an incessant modulation.” In stuttering, more about whether one has conducted one’s life through one’s volition
boundaries vibrate, loosen and shift. The stutter is the anxious moment rather than simply going through the motions, and thus embrace one’s 06 The notion of joy here is drawn from Baruch Spinoza’s writings
when one has innumerable futures at one’s lips. paths. For Nietzsche, to ask oneself whether one can truly embrace one’s on the subject. In his seminal texts, Ethics, Spinoza wrote that “joy is a
8 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Trans. Daniel Smith and own actions and decisions is “the greatest weight”. “How well disposed man’s passage from a lesser to greater perfection.” (Book III Proposition
Michael Greco), London and New York: Verso, 1998, p.109. would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more 59, Scholium ii.), Spinoza is careful to point out although perfection can
fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” Nietzsche’s be lesser or greater, it does not reach “perfection” in this sense is not a
concerns were not for the next life. Rather, it is a matter of how much state of completion (or categorical Goodness). It is a process whereby the
03 Philosopher-psychoanalyst Félix Guattari wrote that ecology you can transform in this life so that you can embrace life truly. If mind-body gains capacity to exercise its own actions on its own accord
in general is really the intertwining of the environmental, social and there are transformations to be made in this life, then they must be rather than being subjugated to perform actions and think thoughts
mental ecologies. None of these are in true stasis, and more so, none made, perhaps again and again, and each change – failure or success – not of one’s critical reflection and creation. Thus, Spinoza continued,
of these really operates independent of the other two. As such, any embraced. Embrace them in this life enough that you can do it again. “If a man were born with the perfection to which he passes, he would
individual’s mind is also embedded in that of other individuals and The “do it again” part is rhetorical. possess it without an affect of joy.” (Book III Proposition 59, Scholium
the non-human realms. And insofar as the environmental and social iii, Explanation.) If a person is perceived to already be perfect, then s/
ecologies are in constant shifts, the mental ecology shifts too. There is The question in this present text puts a twist on Nietzsche’s question by he cannot experience joy because there will be no gain in the power to
definitely anxiety when encountering and immersing in an ecology that asking whether we can embrace change, again and again, in this life; act to one’s accords. Joyfulness and perfection occur in the process of
“is concerned only with the movement and intensity of the evolution recurring change as life’s movement itself. Can we embrace repeated gaining capacity to act. “The more perfection each thing has, the more it
processes” without definitive end-states. And these movements propel in changes in this life enough that we embrace repeated changes again in acts and the less it is acted on; and conversely, the more it acts, the more
“irreversible durations”. the next? (Even as we acknowledge there is no reincarnation.) Hence perfect it is.” (Book V, Proposition 40.)
there is a joy in this embrace. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, (Trans. Edwin Curley), New York & London:
Without end-states and also without the notion of a “starting state” to get Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Trans. Walter Kaufmann), New Penguin Books, 1996.
back to, the three ecologies are engaged in a process of creating anew at York: Vintage Books, 1974, §341.
each turn. Guattari, following Walter Benjamin, wrote that “new stories
of the permanent recreation of the world” must replace “the narrative of
biblical genesis” (and eschatology, one may add). Engaging the world,
is “to bring into being other worlds.” “The creation of new living animal
and vegetable looks inevitable on the horizon.”
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (Trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Simon),
London and New York: Continuum Books, 2000, pp.44 & 67.

An Incomplete Plan
 07 Education theorists Eileen Honan and David Bright explored ways 11 A more radical way to look at thinking is proposed by Deleuze.
to reframe the body of the thesis. They proposed that instead of framing Thinking truly is not the same as recognition. Recognition is
the thesis as being problem solving or having to prove a hypothesis, a recollection. Thought together with that object, space, or space which
thesis can be a text “that practices juxtaposition, collage or montage the mind-body encounters, which defies mere recognition cannot be
rather than the propositional logic and well-formed syntactic structure said to be a “sensible but the being of the sensible.” It is as if sense itself
of conventional prose.” As such, the thesis opens up the potential for has become a presence that can bear on the mind-body composition to
avenues to be travelled, and sometimes those avenues may not even be spurred toward new lines of action-thoughts.
be explicitly drawn out in the thesis body itself. It is possible that the Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton), New York
body of the urban design plan or thesis can be reframed as a space for & London; Continuum Books, 2001, p.139.
dialogue rather than a set of directives. Similar treatment of planning
can be sought.
Eileen Honan & David Bright, “Writing a Thesis Differently,”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2016), 1-13.

08
Michel Foucault (in conversation with Gilles Deleuze), Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Eds. &
Trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977, p.208.

09 It is often easier to imagine how a built structure like a Greek ruin

temple, or a broken social system like housing equity, can be completed 9
because we are accustomed to applying the well-defined architectural
typologies and social schemas to things we encounter. In these cases, we
already have the solutions. It can be much harder to imagine a course
of action that experiments with these things to produce outcomes after
outcomes without telos.

10 Philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests even potentiality becomes

an actuality it does not mean potentialities are exhausted. He wrote
that potential is at once both the potential-to-do and the potential-
to-not-do. The latter term is not a true negative term – what does
not actualise becomes an intensity point pregnant with innumerable
potentialities. This intense point gets more and more intense – but is
beyond quantification – insofar as more and more relations are brought
in connection to what is actualised over time. Agamben wrote,

Potentiality, maintains itself in relation to its own privation, its

own sterēsis, its own non-Being. This relation constitutes the essence
of potentiality […] to be in elation of one’s own incapacity. Beings
that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own
impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential.

That which is not written or drawn, even that which the author had
refused to draw, forms part of a greater more intense field of potentialities.
This intense field has psychical, metaphysical, psychological, and even
physical-neurological forces that can bear back on us. To collaborate and discuss, contact FOONG P. CHAN
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy [Link]@[Link]
(Editor and Translator: Daniel Heller-Roazan), Stanford, CA: Stanford [Link]@[Link]
University Press, 1999, pp.180 – 182. LAST UPDATE: 2019-06-28-14:30

An Incomplete Plan