El “lado oscuro“ de la gobernanza del uso de suelo: las narrativas espacio-temporales y la neutralización del riesgo ambiental

Abstract

The term governance evokes processes of negotiation and collaboration between civil society, private sector, and state actors. Yet, governance processes also involve the contest of values in efforts to justify state-backed decision-making. Drawing on 45 semi-structured in-depth interviews with key land use governance actors – developers, planners, politicians, and engineers – in South Australia, this article investigates how ‘techniques of neutralization’ are reflexively deployed to deflect critiques, manage opposition, and justify contentious new coastal land developments threatened by sea-level rise. How these techniques draw on a tacit spatial metaphors is explored, proposing that a meta-technique is to defer to time to discursively neutralize the projected environmental risks to coastal space. In doing so, the legitimacy of land use planning systems is not called into question. These everyday spatiotemporal neutralization techniques offer an initial typology for further comparative analysis of the ‘dark side’ of global neoliberal urbanisation.