Urban, architectural, and other modes of official or state planning number among the key modes in which larger political narratives and practices are given spatial form. Planning is also a site for contestation and resistance. So how is planning itself a site for occupation of all kinds: a mode of commemoration, enactment, erasure?  How is planning also a site for contestation and resistance? In many ways, planning projects become focal points where confrontations over the future of the city, the form it will take and the actors who will be able to claim a place in it are able to/will not be enacted. We will focus here on the Occupied Territories of Palestine, on the remaking of Beirut after the Civil War and the invasion by Israel in 2006, but also on post-apartheid cities, on the development of cities for tourism as well as global sporting events, as the enactment of development projects like airports, dams, and highways. Local populations are displaced and take to the streets in resistance (in China or Jordan, London or Bahrain, for instance) Planning can also be the focal point for directly surfacing and enacting alternatives, as in contemporary practices of participatory budgeting (e.g. Porto Allegre).

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