Academics, experts and politicians have come to the conclusion that democracy is in trouble. The contemporary understanding is that new competitive pressures from the outside and unruly publics from the inside have drastically changed the way politics is enacted. Where it was previously provoked by ideological programs it is now engulfed in issues, and where it used to be framed by established democratic institutions it is now characterized by informal governance arrangements. In this environment, it is argued, only the reformed institution can bridge the gap between politics and democracy and restore legitimacy to the decision-making process. In Swedish planning, these reforms have positioned the citizen as the point of departure for democratic politics, manifested in procedural citizen dialogues and in authorities’ relinquishment of political responsibilities. But when unplanned publics do emerge, they are intuitively dismissed as NIMBYs and obstacles to the planning process – preemptively foreclosing opportunities for public democratic enactment. The aim of this paper is to analyze this process by examining the public controversy surrounding the ongoing redevelopment of Slakthusområdet in southern Stockholm. It draws heavily on Noortje Marres’ work. She suggests that politics pursued outside of established institutions could be occasions for democracy since the activity might indicate that issues are finding sites that are hospitable to their articulation as matters of public concern. However, her issue-focused reasoning also positions the citizen as the focal point for democratic politics, meaning that those who fail to accept this role inevitably have themselves to blame. Her work is therefore supplement­ed with Laurent Thévenot’s understanding of how forms, that is, ideals, rules, and procedures, can be just as important as issues in informing the decisions among actors. Through interviews with those involved, this paper highlights the ease in which the city disarticulates the attempts at public democratic enactment, a proficiency largely stemming from its “reformed” management form. Moreover, while the public finally managed to settle their issue at stake, it came with the substantial cost of eroded faith in democracy. Drawing on this, the paper concludes that both issues and forms, publics and the public sector, are crucial in facilitating the enactment of democratic politics.

This thesis explores the interplay between practices of activism and planning through a focus on place. By developing an understanding of place as a multi-situated and multi-scalar concept, I show how a theoretical approach based on a revision of the concept of place can bridge and contribute to both the fields of anthropology of planning and of social movements. Providing a series of insights into the Milanese urban periferia (outskirts) this research argues that activism and planning are continuously engaged in redefining the field of political action. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival and historical research, my work shows the empirical interplay between planning and politics as a central arena for the shaping of broader historical and geographical tensions. A number of controversies and episodes of protest are examined to illustrate the experiences of activists and citizens involved across different periods of contemporary Milanese history. I approached these events as elements of place-making; processes where different subjectivities, practices and ideas come together as transformative, ever-changing instances. The neighbourhood of Quarto Oggiaro in the extreme outskirts of the city has provided a setting for fieldwork research to address the idea of the anthropological places as the result of a mutual constitution between myself as the researcher and the people I encountered in the field who were engaged in defining their environment. This approach resulted central to producing collaborative processes and for unfolding a relational interpretation of places. By engaging with these experiences this thesis demonstrates the need for examining the categories and practices of political and planning imagination and the multiple practices of world-making to make a significant contribution to understanding the human and social contexts of modern urban realities.