Strategic Action Planning and the Double Crisis

Planning in the global South has long promised to order, integrate, and develop the city. Yet the most significant urban transformations of the twenty-first century have taken place largely outside planning's reach – or worse, as a direct consequence of it. The crisis this poses is double: at once technical and ontological. Technically, modernist master planning presupposes a homogeneous, networked city and a legitimate, capable state that rarely exists in the fragmented cities of the global South. Ontologically, it has functioned as a colonial world-making project, imposing a Western urban imaginary that forecloses other ways of organising city life.

Strategic Action Planning (SAP) has emerged as a compelling response to this crisis. Drawing on the case of Kanjur Marg, Mumbai, this essay argues that SAP – theorised by Levy (2007) – powerfully addresses the technical dimensions of planning's failure, but cannot, from within the terms of its own engagement, confront the ontological refusal that underwrites them. The result is a planning practice that secures genuine material redistribution while leaving the prior question – who counts as urban, and on whose terms – unresolved.