Three Performativities of Innovation in Public Transport Planning

Focusing on planners’ own stories of innovation in public transport planning in three Nordic contexts (Denmark, Sweden and Norway), this article explores how individual planning professionals develop specific abilities that shape the possibilities of action and innovation in planning practices. To illuminate how planning is dynamically renewed, revised and consolidated over time by the individual actions of planners, the article offers an interpretation of the performative qualities of planners by adapting Butler’s feminist critical theory on performativity to the public transport planning context. Having individuated a set of repetitive acts that constitute planning, the article concludes with a reflection on how understanding planning under an analytic of performativity makes it possible to see planning for its transformative capacities of reshaping, re-enacting and re-experiencing the future within a set of meanings and forms of legitimation.