Intimate Planning on the Urban Edge

Introducing a new way of understanding community agency in urban transformation from the perspective of an informal Santo Domingo settlement

In this pioneering volume, Bjørn Sletto defines “intimate planning” as the community-scale assemblages of everyday life—winding alleyways between homes, jumbles of water pipes, and tangles of electrical lines—and the social relationships that sustain them. Drawing on seventeen years of activist research in Los Platanitos, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, Sletto argues for the importance of intimate community relationships in urban landscapes.

Tracing the effects of a stormwater and road project in Los Platanitos, Sletto highlights residents and community groups as they develop their own, community-based forms of planning in the face of displacement, conflict, and social change. Intimate Planning on the Urban Edge is a rare ethnographic account that demonstrates a multiyear process of co-learning with residents. It provides a powerful model for engaged scholarship in marginalized communities while demonstrating why everyday infrastructures matter for understanding agency, belonging, and urban futures.