Co-Production Between Insurgency and Exploitation: Promises and Precarities of a Traveling Concept

Abstract

Co-production has inspired planning practice and research in the past decades. Along with its appropriation in the planning literature it has undergone manifold translations and its boundaries have become blurry. In this commentary I propose a conceptualisation of co-production not only as efficient service provision by citizens and state actors together but furthermore as a kind of city-making that has transformative potential beyond concrete interventions in the present moment. This matters because it enables a conceptual discrimination between co-production and the exploitation of marginalised people’s resources, time, and labour. I argue that the necessity of this discrimination becomes apparent when analysing co-productive efforts in their embeddedness in space and time.