Artful theory: thinking spatial planning differently

ABSTRACT I attempt to unsettle the taken-for-granted clichés of powerful discourses and Western-centrism evident in the colonizing enterprises of much international planning-related research and practice. Regarding art as a powerful lens which can provoke us to see and think the world differently, I engage Lubaina Himid’s spatial planning-related artwork, The Operating Table, as an inclusive synthesis of stories, meanings and land use elements, which may stimulate creation of new or reconfigured concepts, institutions and practices which would decolonialize encounters between First Nations’ and Western-oriented ways of knowing and being. I attempt to bring Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of inclusive disjunctive synthesis into alliance with First Nation onto-epistemologies, potentially working together in difference.