Planning TheoryPub Date : 2025-05-01Epub Date: 2024-05-31DOI: 10.1177/14730952241258693
Federico Savini
{"title":"Strategic planning for degrowth: What, who, how.","authors":"Federico Savini","doi":"10.1177/14730952241258693","DOIUrl":"10.1177/14730952241258693","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Degrowth is gaining traction as a viable alternative to mainstream approaches to sustainability. However, translating degrowth insights into concrete strategies of collective action remains a challenge. To address this challenge, this paper develops a degrowth perspective for strategic spatial planning as well as a strategic approach for degrowth. I argue that a degrowth transition needs to address three strategic issues: depth, agency, and trajectory. Degrowth strategies aim for satiation, the satisfaction of all essential needs in a particular society. To do so, they rely on diffused societal power, raising from existing practices of reduction. Strategies also follow a nonlinear trajectory that seeks to prefigure satiation, popularize it among the masses, and then pressure existing institutions. Strategic spatial planning offers important insights for dealing with these challenges but needs to embrace satiation as a strategic goal. It can do so by creating complementarities between prefigurative practices that perform satiation. The article defines and illustrates these processes by looking at the making of Amsterdam's 'doughnut' strategy.</p>","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"24 2","pages":"141-162"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11925690/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143694075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-11-11DOI: 10.1177/14730952231214277
Eva Álvarez de Andrés
{"title":"Promoting socio-spatial and cognitive justice through critical pedagogies","authors":"Eva Álvarez de Andrés","doi":"10.1177/14730952231214277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231214277","url":null,"abstract":"Thousands of people are currently being excluded from the right to the city, which makes urgent a reflection on how to articulate innovative and critical learning actions to promote socio-spatial and cognitive justice in the emerging context. An analytical framework inspired in Giddens' and Fraser’s theories, is proposed for a systematic analysis of the literature on critical pedagogies, and for studying an articulated sequence of learning-action experiences happened over fifteen years. The analysis is supported by qualitative information harvested from the experience of the Polytechnic University of Madrid with the communities in Ginaw Rails Nord (Dakar, Senegal) and Las Sabinas (Madrid, Spain).The results critically question the hegemonic construction of knowledge and the predominant ways of categorisation, crossing the abyssal lines between the Global North and the Global South, showing that (1) transforming structures involves challenging power relations within and outside the educational structure, and engaging in plural and equitable learning-action communities from which dominant policies, practices, and discourses may be challenged; (2) practices and policies may be transformed through collective experimentation processes that contribute to the co-production of both the city and knowledge, and (3) transforming the discourses of dominant power requires questioning acquired knowledge and the way it is produced, assuming the commitment and responsibility for constructing and disseminating an emancipatory pedagogy through the ecologies of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"32 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135041993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-10-23DOI: 10.1177/14730952231209755
Giulia Li Destri Nicosia, Laura Saija
{"title":"Planning as an instituting process. Overcoming Agamben’s despair using Esposito’s political ontology","authors":"Giulia Li Destri Nicosia, Laura Saija","doi":"10.1177/14730952231209755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231209755","url":null,"abstract":"In the face of the growing interest in Agamben’s work by planning scholars, this article suggests reframing such an interest by examining the theoretical controversy between Agamben and another Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito, with special attention to their common roots within the philosophical realm of political ontology. Their different conceptualizations of biopolitics and norms can lead to opposite conceptualizations of the relationship between people and institutions leading to very different planning theoretical possibilities. Like Agamben, Esposito’s theory helps recognise the intrinsic violence of planning discourses. However, unlike Agamben, Esposito provides a constructive way out of it through the disentanglement of the exclusionary level of norms from the potentially inclusive affirmative biopolitics (not politics over life but politics of life) of what he calls the instituting thought. Esposito’s conceptualization of institutions can further support the ongoing new-institutionalist developments of planning scholarship, showing a way to conceptualize the planning relevance of civic organizing, insurgent practices, and social uprisings without undermining the primacy of institutions in planning.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"42 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135406286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1177/14730952231203098
Walter Julio Nicholls, Ashley Camille Hernandez
{"title":"The contradictory field of community organizing in the United States: A theoretical framework","authors":"Walter Julio Nicholls, Ashley Camille Hernandez","doi":"10.1177/14730952231203098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231203098","url":null,"abstract":"The urban studies and planning literatures largely conceive of community organizations as either clients of neoliberal regimes or the advocates of marginalized communities. Whereas the first emphasizes structural constraints, the latter focuses on the conditions that permit organizations to exercise agency in planning arenas. This theoretical paper suggests that both frameworks reveal important mechanisms but belie the contradictory pressures facing community organizations. We turn to organizational and social movement literatures to argue that community organizations face two competing forces stemming from resource needs. First, they need money to maintain a staff and finance basic operations. As these are nonprofit organizations, money typically comes from external private and public grants. Second, for communities to support organizations and delegate them representative functions, the organizations need to be considered legitimate by the community. Though community organizations need both money and legitimacy, these resources conflict with one another. Too much dependency on external funders can undercut an organization’s legitimacy to represent community interests in an autonomous and unconflicted way. Too much autonomy from external funders can enhance the legitimacy of organizations, but it can also result in financial destitution. Thus, rather than conceive of community organizations as structural puppets or the voice of the people, we suggest that most are positioned in a contradictory field that pulls them in conflicting directions.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135645065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-10-03DOI: 10.1177/14730952231196339
Efrat Eizenberg
{"title":"The problem of “power” in planning theory","authors":"Efrat Eizenberg","doi":"10.1177/14730952231196339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231196339","url":null,"abstract":"use of the concept of power in planning theory had become with time a conceptual problem. It chains our imagination for justice and change. Grand narratives of power generate a reductionist understanding of urban problems and planning roles in their making and alleviation. Breaking free of these chains is possible only by committing to the full gamut of relations and dynamics of multiple components","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135740348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-10-03DOI: 10.1177/14730952231196332
Maisa Totry
{"title":"Power dynamics and self-organizing urbanism. A comment","authors":"Maisa Totry","doi":"10.1177/14730952231196332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231196332","url":null,"abstract":"In the last two decades, there has been significant growth in the body of knowledge that views the urban environment as a complex system. In her article Patterns of Self-organization in the Context of Urban Planning: Reconsidering Venues of Participation, Eizenberg,s (2019) critically investigates the phenomenon of self-organization within urban planning. By examining participating venues through the lens of power structures in self-organization dynamics, the article presents crucial inquiries for future studies in urban complexity. This comment traces the fundamental assumptions underlying Eisenberg’s analytical approach and attempts to further investigate the interplay between formal planning, urban complexity, and social structure. In addition, this discussion suggests that the correlation between the two theoretical frameworks of power structure and self-organization presents new perspectives on both paradigms. Firstly, fundamental assumptions about formal planning, urban development, and social structure within the framework of complexity theory need to be identified. While a precise definition of a complex system remains elusive, the characteristics of such a system are in consensus. It typically comprises of numerous elements or agents operating across various scales with interdependencies that influence each other. The interconnectedness and interdependence of these elements pose challenges regarding predictability and control. The absence of centralized control in the constant exchange of information, goods, and other resources among various entities enables the emergence of spontaneous order. The mentioned order, which emerges at the local level, engages in interactions with other systems and, as a result of feedback loops, generates novel organizational patterns at higher levels forming a self-organization system (Portugali, 1999). When this theory is applied to the urban system, it holds basic assumptions that, different from rational long-term plan-based planning, such a system is too complex and cannot be controlled or predicted. Specifically, as a plan becomes more precise, its","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135695718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-10-03DOI: 10.1177/14730952231206418
Nannan Zhao, June Wang, Yuting Liu
{"title":"Institutionalization of public interest in planning: Evolving mechanisms of public representation in China’s urban regeneration policymaking","authors":"Nannan Zhao, June Wang, Yuting Liu","doi":"10.1177/14730952231206418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231206418","url":null,"abstract":"How to capture, represent, and materialize public interest in urban planning has gone through multiple rounds of experimentation, crystallizing a number of regulatory regimes of planning in different historical and political-economic contexts. However, how to define the “public” and capture the public interest in urban planning remains problematic in both planning practices and democratic theory. Therefore, drawing upon Dewey and Habermas’s view of the public sphere, this paper introduces a scale perspective to examine the subjects in planning and the power framing process in defining the public in urban regeneration policymaking. First, this paper revisits the current debates on the concept of public interest and identifies three interpretations of public interest materialization: utilitarian, unitary, and communicative. Second, this paper illustrates the institutionalization process of public interest in China’s urban planning system. We critically examine the evolving mechanisms of public representation in China’s urban regeneration policymaking since 1949. The institutionalization of public interest in China shows distinguished trajectories from the Western countries. These differences are caused by different values that define the scale of “public” in different socio-political contexts. Given the emerging communicative turn in China, we found a hybrid norm of public interest as reflected in the recent “co-production” model of urban regeneration. The contribution of this paper is threefold: 1) highlights the validity of the public interest concept by introducing a scale sensitivity to analyze the subjects in planning; 2) complements public interest typology by identifying a hybrid norm in China that weaves between unitary and communicative interpretations; 3) revisits Dewey’s democratization theory by conceptualizing the institutionalization of public interest in semi-authoritarian China that is determined across the scales of subjects in planning, the ever-changing political-economic contexts, and the planning application in established rules.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135647658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Outside-in: Co-production and the spatial planning systems in Italy and England","authors":"Francesca Bragaglia, Ombretta Caldarice, Umberto Janin Rivolin","doi":"10.1177/14730952231203516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231203516","url":null,"abstract":"This article concerns the growing interest in ‘co-production’ in spatial planning, focusing on its relationship with planning systems. The article refers to Italy and England – two institutional contexts with different planning systems – and concludes that co-production can operate outside or inside the planning system. Both models have pros and cons. However, the critical factor determining co-production regarding the planning system appears to be related to how land use rights are allocated. While prior allocation through prescriptive plans keeps co-production out of the system, only allocation as a final case-by-case decision allows co-production to be part of it.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135193546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-09-26DOI: 10.1177/14730952231203819
Robbert van Driessche, Peter Ache, Arnoud Lagendijk
{"title":"How to plan for discontinuity? Equipping ‘anticipatory assemblages’ with ‘archives of the future’.","authors":"Robbert van Driessche, Peter Ache, Arnoud Lagendijk","doi":"10.1177/14730952231203819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231203819","url":null,"abstract":"For more than two decades, critical planning scholars have called for strategic spatial planning to cut its rational roots stemming from the 1960s–70s, and counter its tendency towards more incremental approaches of the 1980s–2000s. To truly address the core challenges of cities and regions in our times, spatial planning should plan for discontinuity. This paper explores how planning may embrace futuring practices to do so. Drawing on three materially oriented futuring approaches, ‘Critical Future Studies’, ‘Sociology of Expectations’, and ‘Sociology of the Future’, futuring practices may serve a threefold aim. First, exposing the power of ‘normalisation’, unlocking silenced futures. Second, providing a stage to exhibit and dramatise ‘future expectations’ (stories, images, artefacts) and their stakeholder connections. Third, letting urban materiality and corporeality truly speak for themselves to the present and the future, opening experiences of, and confrontations with, the technological, environmental and geographical unconscious. Consequently, we show how such futuring can take shape through the creation of an ‘Archive of the Future’, which we illustrate through Rotterdam as a case.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134960890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Planning TheoryPub Date : 2023-09-26DOI: 10.1177/14730952231203151
Peter Højrup Søder
{"title":"Scale-dependent complexity in administrative units and implications for data-driven decision-making models","authors":"Peter Højrup Søder","doi":"10.1177/14730952231203151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14730952231203151","url":null,"abstract":"Through analysis and discussion of basic systemic properties of a rural municipality, this paper explores how aggregating data in planning and land use modeling can potentially obscure intricate real-world behavior. Complexity theory is applied as a theoretical framework for explaining this hypothesis. Thus, the aim of this study is to address the author’s desire to understand systemic complexity when designing a data-driven decision-making model for rural planning. The novelty of this approach is two-fold: one, most studies on scalability issues in planning addresses spatial complexity, more so than systemic complexity within the complex system that the very act of planning strives to dictate. Two, although delimited to the scope of the study, the accessibility to and use of complete and valid socio-demographic data enables a rarely demonstrated accurate representation of an entire population. It is ultimately observed that on the disaggregated municipal level, systemic dispersion increases parallelly with population size, a correlation that is significantly influenced by gender ratio in any given parish – a characteristic that was not visible at the aggregated municipal level. In addition to advancing the understanding and placement of complexity science within spatial data science, these insights will make it easier to assess the generalizability of any given administrative unit by quantifying basic complexity attributes; in this case based on the correlation dispersion caused by the fragmentation of a municipality into its comprising parishes.","PeriodicalId":47713,"journal":{"name":"Planning Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134886113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}