Who Am I the Planner?

When considering the question of who am I the planner? I find it impossible to separate my inner self – the accumulation of personal experiences and internal conflicts – from the external environment that shaped me. Reality as lived is not just experience; it is always a cultural and emotional construction. This is what Maturana argues about reality and human experience in The Tree of Knowledge. The moment we start talking about what is "real", we have already left pure experience behind and entered the realm of interpretation, which is never neutral. The question "who am I the planner?" thus shifts into: from which interpreted reality do I plan? What reality chains do I seek to dismantle or regenerate? This essay argues that who the planner is cannot be separated from how they know, and that only by confronting the partiality of their own reality can they build an ethics that is genuinely responsible rather than presuming to know what is good for others.

The idea of the real, the possible, and the political was present to me long before I had the language to express it. I grew up on a suburban hillside on the outskirts of Damascus, where I witnessed firsthand how war and power struggles reshape individuals, communities, urban spaces – and, more intimately, myself. This neighbourhood was an hour from the city centre, separated by a strange sequence of sectarian divides, social hierarchies, forms of urbicide, and deep-rooted inequalities that I had long felt but never consciously questioned. I made this journey daily for eighteen years, left in a constant state of questioning the system we operate within.

What I was navigating was the spatial manifestation of power – how inequality is encoded into the built environment. Planning had actively produced these inequalities through decisions about infrastructure, zoning, and resource allocation that reflected whose reality was considered legible and whose was not. The sectarian divides were, in many cases, deliberately deepened by the same systems that claimed to govern in the name of order and improvement.

The best way out is always through. – Robert Frost, 1915

My interpretation of Frost's solution – go through – is to refuse the fantasy of stepping outside a broken system and critiquing it from a safe distance. It means tracing the problem's seams from the inside, understanding its logic, and aiming to dismantle it from within.