F.P.

CHAN, “A New Space of Evaluation: To Be Done with the Planner-Judge Figure”

IASTE SINGAPORE PRESENTATION NOTES (UPDATED DRAFT 2022-12-04)

Cover
- Hi everyone! The paper I’m sharing today comes from reflecting on my work as a social housing
planner in Vancouver. Specifically, I’m wondering, what else besides the current mode of
judgement can planners develop to assess projects, especially in settler cities?

Introduction
- I’ll start by reflecting a familiar planning tradition: that of senior planners handing down the “Big
Book of By-Laws” to their juniors. The By-Laws are to guide the juniors. Why? Because By-Laws
are assumed to represent the “Good City”, and this “Goodness” is treated as beyond history and
universally applicable. This condition of universality and ahistoricity allows the By-Laws to
become the unquestioned / unquestionable ground that informs the planners’ judgments.
- But this assumed universality and ahistoricity can negatively impact social housing projects.
Indigenous housing, competing against market real estate, is especially impacted.

Planner-Judge
- Furthermore, this assumed universality produces the planner-judge figure, whose rulings often
extends the empire’s spatial logic. This can prolong territorial dispossessions, and hinder
Indigenous people, as well as other disadvantaged peoples, ability to live with ease in the city.

Primary Aims
- Responding to these issues, this paper explores conceptual-tools that might be useful to counter
the planner-judge and the court of planning… to rethink planning’s relation to empire.
- The working questions are:

How may the encounter between by-laws (including the Planning Department) and a project
(including its applicants) move beyond the hierarchies and binaries of the “Court of Planning”?
How to foster new relations and behaviours with each other that can increase our capacities to
act and transform, and cultivate new desires outside imperial law?

- These questions aim to release the applicant (especially Indigenous ones) from its subjugated
position of a “defendant”, AND release the planner from the role of the judge.

Theoretical Framework
- Philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s concept of the “body” provides one of those conceptual-tools that
may help us forge ways for the encounter between by-laws and projects become more capable
of producing relations of care. For Spinoza, a body is shaped and reshaped by its interactions
with other bodies; so much so the demarcation between bodies is never clear. Spinoza wrote:

What constitutes the form of the individual consists the union of the bodies. 1
If two or multiple bodies come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power,
and consequently more right over nature than both of them separately, and the more there are
that have so joined in alliance, the more right they all collectively will possess. 2

1
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley, (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1996), Book 2, Lemma 4, Demonstration.
2
Baruch Spinoza, A Political Treatise, trans. Robert Elwes, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2004), Chapter 2, Part 13. One point to
stress, during Spinoza’s time, “Nature” consists of the natural, cultural, sociopolitical ecologies. Thus, gaining more right over nature means
more power to operate on one’s own terms despite any limiting economic, natural and sociopolitical circumstances; not to destroy the ecology.

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F.P. CHAN, “A New Space of Evaluation: To Be Done with the Planner-Judge Figure”
IASTE SINGAPORE PRESENTATION NOTES (UPDATED DRAFT 2022-12-04)

- A Spinozan body isn’t constrained by given socioeconomic, cultural or racial identities. Instead,
bodies are composed of many forces and parts that can be recombined with other (even non-
human) bodies to form new relations… Even new bodies with new capacities and desires. 3
- From this approach, a colonial body can become un-colonial, depending on what relations it
forms with other bodies.4 Maybe a wilful creative mis-reading/mis-use of colonial by-laws.5
- But before exploring how to remix the relations between the bodies of the by-laws and projects,
I want to look at a project that sparked this paper’s topic.

401 Jackson (Diagram A – Bare Site > Axon > Measurements)

- In 2020, I was assigned to assess an Indigenous Senior-Housing Project in Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood. The neighbourhood’s high homeless count is
overrepresented by Indigenous people.
- Site-wise, it is 120 ft. by 120 ft. and at a block corner.

401 Jackson (Diagram B – Ideal L-Shape)

- Zoning-wise, it is in the Downtown Eastside Official Development Plan, which permits a 120 ft.
height (~ 12 floors) and a plot-ratio of 7.00. For block corners like this, a L-Shape building is
expected, because this shape maximises sunlight into the units.

401 Jackson (Diagram C – Bare Site > With SE Corner Unconsolidated)

- HOWEVER, the SE corner, which has a small apartment, couldn’t get consolidated to form the
perfect 120 x 120 plot. This makes getting the expected L-Shape impossible.

401 Jackson (Diagram D – Courtyard Original)

- In order to get all the permitted density (and units), the architect proposed a scheme with a 12
storeys north-block, and a 9-storeys south-block. A 25 ft. wide courtyard separates the blocks.
- However, even before drawing up this scheme, we knew units facing the narrow courtyard
would be quite dark year-round.
- Important point: The applicant felt the dark and less-than-livable condition will compound onto
the hardship already endured by the seniors in Canada’s infamous residential schools.

401 Jackson (Diagram E – Courtyard Adjusted Height)

- To get more sun to the courtyard and units around it, the architect proposed to shift three floors
from the south-block to the north-block. Lowering the south-block permits more sun through.
However, this means the north-block, at 15-storeys, is three floors over the permitted height.
- So, we needed a legal mechanism to support this height-variance. And we found this in the form
of a “hardship clause” that allows variances for hardships.
- The applicant claimed the unconsolidated SE corner is the hardship as it hampers the
developability of the more liveable L-Shape footprint.
- Furthermore, the applicant stressed that this site-based hardship can also compound onto the
seniors’ mental and physical hardship from the residential school.

3
One can think of Homi Bhabha’s hybrids. Although Spinoza’s (and later Deleuze’s) body goes beyond the hybrid in that its identity cannot be
reduced down to any specific hybrids. The Spinozan body constantly eludes identification by dominant powers in order to preserve its powers
of alterity and resistance. Its “alterity” (otherness) is never the binary oppose of the dominant system.
4
Spinoza’s notion of how poison only acquires its poisonousness by its relation
5
Misosophy.

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F.P. CHAN, “A New Space of Evaluation: To Be Done with the Planner-Judge Figure”
IASTE SINGAPORE PRESENTATION NOTES (UPDATED DRAFT 2022-12-04)

Initial Rejections
- We presented this hardship claim to senior management. But their initial response was
hesitance. Four points outlined their hesitance:
1. Inadequate liveability may not count as hardship because the alternate scheme can still
land the permitted density without an adjusted height. This interpretation ties hardship
with the land’s economic value, thus also privileging market scenarios: For example, a
developer could still sell the dark units as “gritty inner city living”, but social housing
doesn’t have the privilege to do that.
2. Hardship Clause only applies to physical site hardships. So residential schools should not
(legally) be mentioned as part of the hardship claim.
3. By-laws must have universal applicability. If we wouldn’t grant a market developer
variance to shift massing around, then we won’t for this project.
4. The height-overage will disrupt the Planning Department’s image of the well-balanced
streetwall height (to street-width ratio) for this neighbourhood.

Variance Approved
- After some internal debates, management granted the variance, by concurring that the
unconsolidated SE corner impacts developability, hence liveability.
- However, they stressed the approval report must not mention hardships that resulted from
colonial land dispossession and residential schools.
- Important to note, while the variance was granted, the planning department remains the sole
decider on what is considered hardship, and what history to include or exclude. This process
retains the imperial power structures and hierarchies, which privileges the planner-judge.
- One might suggest, the planning department operates like this because it takes its by-laws as
equivalent with justice and the “good city”.

Law = Good?
- Here, we can turn to legal scholar Alexandre Lefebvre to further explain this tie between the law
and the Good. Lefebvre outlined three ways 6 law (and we can include planning by-laws here)
validates itself as “Good”:
1. Law assumes everything (bodies and relations) is subsumable under existing legal
concepts, hence judgeable by existing articles of law.
2. Things judged to be unlawful are not discarded by law; rather they remain within law’s
range of predetermined categories, albeit categories defining the “unlawful”.
3. Things that cannot be subsumed as lawful (or unlawful) are said to be wrongly
conceptualised. They must be better conceptualised or to be conceptually-moulded to
law’s categories, so that they can be better explained by existing legal concepts. (Law
could even mould something to its image of unlawfulness.) 7

- These three postulates allow Law to stay unchanged while compelling things Law presides over
to change. Law itself to stay unchanged because it takes its own image of the Good and justice
as immutable. What amounts to “change” in the things Law presides over is actually an effacing
of differences. HOW? Here, “change” simply means things ‘correcting’ themselves to fit law’s
image of the good. Law reconceptualises something to its image of (in)-justice.
6
Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) 7-9.
7
For example, Person A does a certain action that is generally seen as harmful. But rather than working out what is unique about this person’s
actions and what lead them to do it, the Law will quickly categorise their actions under a certain precedent or (criminal) legal concept. Law
produces the image of what the criminal is supposed to look like.

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F.P. CHAN, “A New Space of Evaluation: To Be Done with the Planner-Judge Figure”
IASTE SINGAPORE PRESENTATION NOTES (UPDATED DRAFT 2022-12-04)

Eyes on the Street?

- However, law’s image of the Good falters in the application/implementation of Law through
legal-articles or by-laws.
- Example: Formalising Jane Jacob’s “Eyes on the Street” to a specific glass-to-solid wall ratio to
ensure visual porosity. This ratio may work for typical cafes and shops, but it doesn’t help with
the privacy needed for workers and clients at sexual health clinics, substance-rehab counselling
services, etc. This was certainly the case for the social service clinics at our Indigenous Senior
Housing Project. The applicant said the large spans of glass could draw unwanted public
exposure for their patients. Here, “Eyes on the Street” could unintentionally invite violence.
- But for some planners, cultivating caring relations and safety in a neighbourhood is possible only
if that glass-to-wall ratio is provided. No other social or architectural means can be substitutes.

Circular Logic
- This inability to think beyond the by-law’s solution reveals something: Instead of how by-laws
can be tools to develop an evolving spatial justice necessary for diversity; obedience to the by-
law becomes the embodiment of the good. Obedience overrides what the by-law means.
- A circular logic appears: “The law is good. The good is the law”. The same logic allows some
planners to say, “The anticipated 120 ft. streetwall is good. Good urbanism is represented by a
120 ft. streetwall”. The by-laws no longer even reference any social relations and histories
(outside itself) that produced that ideal. Here, the by-law itself is exalted as the ideal.
- This approach reaffirms the court of planning and the planner-judge as sole adjudicator.

Again… How to Unsettle Empire’s Structure of Judgment ?

- How then to unsettle this court of planning and the planner-judge in order for new relations of
care and ethical behaviours toward each other to take shape?

Irony and Humour

- Lefebvre suggested, to unsettle the Law we may begin with giving attention to, as well as
actively produce, processes and relations that are considered improper by dominant legal
systems (including planning law).
- Following Deleuze’s study on how irony and humour can disrupt law’s assumed immutability 8,
Lefebvre sees irony and humour as tools to unsettle law, to bring forth a necessary
improperness that nonetheless can open up new relations that lead to new forms of ethics.

Humour and irony subtend the possibility for social and political thought and true apprehension
of movements and desires.9
The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears as an art of principles, of
ascent towards the principles and of overturning principles. The second is humour, which is an
art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls.10

- I will now suggest two “experiments” we can explore (maybe in a studio setting) to see how
irony and humour may foster new modes of encounter between by-laws and projects.

8
At least in the realm of literature and art, such as Kafka, Masoch and Bacon’s work, Deleuze saw ways in which The Law’s high-position can be
overturned.
9
Alexandre Lefebvre, “A New Image of Law: Deleuze and Jurisprudence,” Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 130 (2005): 103-126, 110.
10
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (New York: Columbia University, 1994), 5.

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F.P. CHAN, “A New Space of Evaluation: To Be Done with the Planner-Judge Figure”
IASTE SINGAPORE PRESENTATION NOTES (UPDATED DRAFT 2022-12-04)

Inverted Judge
- First experiment flips the roles of the planner-judge and the project-applicant.
- Here, the applicant will query the planning department about how its by-laws attend to ways of
life uncategorisable by planning’s legal-spatial concepts. More importantly, how would
planning’s notions of the good city and assumption of the by-law’s neutrality impact Indigenous
people and other disadvantaged groups’ capacities to act, desire and create? Perhaps, the
planners have to submit an “application” or proof of validity to the social-housing applicant.
- The intent is to get the planning department to reread their by-laws through broader global
historical, economic and spatial forces.
- This experiment performs a form of irony associated with situational or role reversal: The judge
is now being judged (for how s/he judges others). One judges the by-law documents for how the
by-laws set up the framework of judgement.
- … HOWEVER, while though this experiment disrupts the court of planning, the roles of the
“judge” and “defendant” are still present. So, a form of this court of judgment remains.
- How then can we liberate ourselves from this court?

Franken-Body of By-Law
- The next experiment involves using by-law documents as the textual, historical and even visual
materials to assemble a “Frankenstein By-Law Body”. Here, the by-law document’s traditional
structure and logic are dismantled. Its texts and images would be fused with words and images
from the project-application that the by-law is supposed to judge. Other historical and spatial
elements may also be folded into this Franken-By-Law.
- Weave in palimpsests, collages and other narrative techniques and media to make planning’s
orthodoxy foreign to itself. YET this foreignness may enable new relations and perceptions.
- The event of this experiment – with the Franken-By-Law – becomes a platform for new
dialogues that may spur new approaches to evaluate projects and form care/ethics/desires
outside planning’s moralised city.
- In this experiment, the bodies of planning by-laws and projects, planner and applicant, may be
decomposed and recombined anew, sometimes beyond the life of the permitting-process time.
More importantly, these bodies are longer strictly defined by their usual identities. 11
- Both experiments aim to disrupt the by-laws’ intended signification process. In that disruptive
gap, other modes of forming care for each other begin to percolate.

Reflections
- To conclude, I recognise the urgency to build social housing, and there isn’t much space and
time to experiment on how to recompose the bodies of by-laws and projects. The dominant
economic productions and the planner-judge are very much entangled, and so countering the
judge must entail countering economic productions. 12
- Nonetheless, it might still be possible for housing activists and theatre-groups to experiment
with flipping the judge vs. defendant. A sort of parallel planning process. It might also be
possible for visual artists to work with planning and law students to reconfigure a by-law
document’s body, and use that occasion to ponder about other ways to challenge and approach
dwelling on stolen lands.

11
With recomposition, new grounds may be formed. However, there is also the possibility that the whole notion of ground (as organizing base)
is forgone. Instead, what is recomposed remains just relations expressing new kinds of potentials. These relations do not need to refer back to a
ground that precedes them. (The third image eschews the “base” or ground” that the planner-judge or applicant bodies sit on.)
12
Due to the intertwinement of the Planner-Judge and Dominant economics, the two experiments described earlier will need to factor
economics, especially on a global scale, for greater efficacy in disrupting the order of judgement. The realm of by-laws is always extra-legal.