"The city" as developmental justification: claimsmaking on the urban through strategic planning

Municipal governments produce a seemingly endless supply of urban strategic plans, which purport to define the city by making claims on its future development trajectories. Critics note that this claimsmaking on the city renders it conceptually vacuous and overextended. Yet it is essential to question the degree to which speculative policymaking is merely rhetorical. Discursive claimsmaking on the city through strategic planning documents is an important technique in urban politicsa form of targeted simplification that benefits particular stakeholders by defining the city around sites in which they are invested. Bids to host sporting mega-events like the Olympic Games are a case in point: event planning corporations routinely make claims on the city, which strategically simplify its forms and processes, often by defining the city in ways that mediate between particular land investment projects and broad visions for citywide development. The implication is that claimsmaking on the city through urban strategic planning is intentionally simplistic and acts as an ideological practice for justifying urban development projects.