Towns within Towns: From Incompossibility to Inclusive Disjunction in Urban Spatial Planning

Abstract

We contemplate Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of in/compossibility through engagement with practices of spatial planning and development at the urban fringe in Australia. In such sites of ecosystem transformation, the presence of wildlife, such as mosquitoes, is often deemed incompossible with felicitous human habitation. We suggest that regarding worlds like those of mosquitoes and humans as divergent, rather than incompossible, opens up opportunities for inclusive disjunctive syntheses which affirm the disjoined terms without excluding one from the other. Relating inclusive disjunction to intensive milieu, we call for development of a more milieu-based approach to planning to facilitate more-than-human coexistence differently.