Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning
Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, produced and owned by the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).
Strategic Spatial Planning Under Pressure in Ukraine
This article examines the transformation of Ukraine’s spatial planning system in the context of decentralisation, regulatory reform, and the growing role of local communities in decision-making. It emphasises the significance of comprehensive spatial development plans as instruments of integrated local governance. Using the Chernihiv region as a case study, the paper analyses institutional, financial, and organisational challenges in implementing planning decisions and highlights gaps between legislation and practice. The study stresses the need to align spatial planning with modern community development strategies, focusing on digitalisation, local capacity building, and stakeholder engagement. Recommendations are proposed to enhance strategic planning tools and promote balanced territorial development.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vira Ohorodnyk, Mariia Markina, Inna Illiashenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
While the need for shrinking cities to adapt their infrastructure to smaller populations is widely recognised, there is still a lack of understanding as to how such policies translate into spatial strategies. Different approaches for urban spaces as well as coordinative strategies at the city scale remain to be clarified from the perspective of urban planning. To understand the spatialisation of strategies for shrinkage, this study investigates two medium-sized cities and identifies their strategies with spatial characteristics at different scales. The findings show local factors that are key to the spatialisation of strategies for shrinkage and how localised growth and shrinkage are leveraged for long-term development. It follows, that urban planning can play a unique role in managing urban shrinkage through its competences in terms of spatialisation and spatial visions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ruiying Liu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Spatial Planning in the Ukraine's National Higher Education System
This article analyses the role and content of spatial planning in contemporary higher education in Ukraine. It has been established that the system for training specialists who acquire knowledge across the broad spectrum of issues related to modern understandings of spatial planning is still in the process of formation. Contemporary educational programs related to spatial planning are, in fact, combined with regards to their content. They include educational components of the basic specialty, spatial planning, and other elements designed to attract prospective students. The state encourages connections between universities and non-formal education as they improve the practical orientation of educational programs related to spatial planning. The experience of Ukraine’s neighbouring EU member states in training spatial planning specialists provides guidance to Ukrainian higher education institutions. The greatest obstacle to the total integration of spatial planning into the higher education system is its legal uncertainty within extant legislation. Accordingly, it is not institutionally possible in Ukraine to define spatial planning as an independent profession and, as a result, training specialists in this field involves numerous risks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roman Lozynskyy, Iryna Zakutynska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Crossing Borders - Actionable Knowledge for Integrated Urban Development Planning in Ukraine
This paper explores various initiatives that have been implemented with a view to strengthening integrated urban development in Ukraine. It emphasises the importance of actionable knowledge and international academic cooperation and it highlights the challenges posed by Ukraine’s political decentralisation and war-related crises; both have strained urban planning capacities. Programmes such as Ukraine Digital and German- Ukrainian partnerships address these needs through digital education, scholarships, and joint courses. The Competence Platform for Integrated Urban Development presented here offers modular courses, tools, and case studies that promote interdisciplinary learning. Teaching modules include lectures, seminars, design studios, and workshops focused on urban resilience, reconstruction, and participatory planning. These initiatives aim to prepare students and municipalities for sustainable and resilient development. Future goals include establishing dual degree programmes and expanding international cooperation to comprehensively rebuild Ukraine’s cities, in line with the principles of the New Leipzig Charter.
Copyright (c) 2025 Frank Schwartze, Antonia Breckwoldt, Detlef Kurth, Anna Kuzyhshyn, Yana Maksymchuk-Hagelstein, Poliksen Qorri-Dragaj, Silke Weidner, Christoph Wessling, Sepideh Zarrin Ghalam https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This Outlook explores the future of mega-events through the case of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, arguing that they should be understood not only as global spectacles but also as large-scale urban projects that reshape cities, mobilise significant resources, and generate lasting territorial effects. The analysis identifies three major challenges. First, environmental sustainability: despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions through innovative construction and mobility strategies, the Olympics’ global scale continues to generate substantial environmental costs. Second, uncertainty: organisers must increasingly respond to climate change, health crises, geopolitical instability, and security threats, which require more adaptive forms of planning and governance. Third, social and political contestation: criticisms related to costs, displacement, surveillance, and uneven benefits challenge the legitimacy of mega-events and raise questions about their long-term legacy. The Outlook concludes that the future of mega-events will depend on their capacity to balance urban development, environmental responsibility, social acceptance, and resilience in an increasingly uncertain world.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marie Delaplace https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Ukraine faces some of the most extreme conditions to have been experienced in Europe since the Second World War, including the loss of human life, depopulation, forced migration, the destruction of settlements, natural and agricultural areas, and the lack of access to basic services (e.g. water, electricity). These extreme conditions require huge, concerted efforts to promote the country’s recovery, as was also the case in Europe in the second half of the 1940s, when countries were rebuilt after being ravaged by war. At that time, new planning practices were developed in many countries in parallel with the establishment of new arrangements of the welfare state, including public housing, education and healthcare provision, on a scale unimaginable just one or two decades earlier. While Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction have been discussed at length, little attention has so far been devoted to the implications for the role of spatial planning in the rebuilding process (with some minor exceptions: Maruniak et al., 2022; UN-Habitat Urban Recovery Framework Thematic Papers, forthcoming). The spatial dimension has largely been absent in political and expert debates, as though geography and the built environment hardly matter, which is certainly not the case. Less than five years ago, pre-war territorial and administrative reforms reshaped the governance and land ownership landscape in Ukraine (Anisimov et al., 2024; Umland and Romanova, 2024). While these shifts have created new opportunities for locally led economic growth, they have also presented new problems and challenges for regional development, nature conservation, and land degradation (Anisimov et al., 2025). These reforms have also increased the dynamism of governance and land management. Understanding the spatial governance context is highly important for the EU and its member states, as Ukraine’s accession to the EU is likely to pose new challenges in the implementation of directives and regulations with direct impact on land.
Copyright (c) 2025 Oleksandr Anisimov, Dominic Stead https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This issue of Transactions of AESOP brings together papers that address key contemporary planning themes and agendas with a particular emphasis on appreciating the importance of time and space in shaping the substantive matters planning addresses and the manner in which it responds to these.
Copyright (c) 2023 Olivier Sykes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial Note by the Immediate Past Editor-in-Chief of Transactions of AESOP
This special issue, under the editorship of Marco Cremaschi, has emerged and evolved across a transition period for the editorship of Transactions of AESOP. When the proposal for the issue was accepted following the AESOP Congress held in Paris in July 2024, culminating a mere fourteen days before the start of the Summer Olympics on July 26, Marco became its Guest Editor. Today, as this significant contribution to the state of knowledge and debate on mega-events as urban game changers is published, Marco is the Editor in Chief of the Journal, following his appointment to the role by the AESOP Council of Representatives in 2025. As the outgoing Editor in Chief, I would like to extend thanks to Marco and all the authors and reviewers who have contributed to this issue. I would also like to thank all those who have contributed to the journal in different ways since 2019 during my tenure as Editor in Chief. In a historical conjuncture where many questions are being asked about the sustainability and ethics of financialised and often predatory academic publishing models, and internationalism is under pressure from many quarters, Transactions epitomises the AESOP ethos in providing an open-access and inclusive space for the international planning community to share research, innovative practices, and constructive provocations. As the journal looks towards its tenth anniversary in 2027, this mission is in safe hands under the new Editorship.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sykes Olivier https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This special issue on the urban impacts of mega-events emerged in the aftermath of the Paris Olympic Games and the 2024 AESOP conference held at Sciences Po. Following that meeting, a few contributions were revised and assembled into the present collection. The connection between the conference and the Games was explicit in the conference title, which echoed the recurrent claim that mega-events function as urban game changers. Yet this proposition has never been self-evident. A substantial body of scholarship has instead qualified the transformative role of the Games in urban development, while showing that their effects on ordinary planning procedures are often more consequential, and at times more problematic, than their celebrated material legacies. All six papers were written after Paris 2024, with several substantially revised or completed in 2026; thereby drawing on post-event assessments rather than bid-stage projections. Paris appears in every paper, not only those directly devoted to it. It is the reference point for Delaplace’s giga-event classification, the comparator for Barcelona and London in Deffner’s analysis, the principal case for Bourdin et al. and Cremaschi, and an implicit benchmark in the Buenos Aires discussion of successful and failed Olympic urbanism.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marco Cremaschi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reconsidering Urban Resilience Assessments Towards Recovery During Conflict
In the face of global crises, resilience is a crucial approach to recovery. Urban resilience frameworks have proliferated in the last three decades, as support for policy-focused guidelines towards sustainable development. However, gaps in the adoption of urban resilience frameworks for local-level urban planning still exist. This study argues whether existing frameworks, despite addressing current global challenges such as climate adaptation or rapid urban growth, are suitable for contexts experiencing conflict. The methodological approach is guided by two themes: 1) How can an urban system be dissected into sub-components, to make it more relatable to resilience approaches? and 2) what qualities of resilience are needed for effective implementation? Both questions support the formulation of a novel urban resilience framework which is integrated into an adaptable digital instrument. A pilot conducted in two Ukrainian cities is presented as the implementation case. The outcome of this study summarises the learnings from implementation and highlights the relevance of integrating resilience assessments into digital platforms focused on local, decentralised planning contexts, to accelerate digital maturity and better prepare against future crises of unprecedented scale.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Moleiro Dale, Ramon Vivanco, Nataliya Makarova , Jan Barski, Joerg Rainer Noennig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Spatial Planning Beyond Algorithmic Logics
Ukraine is currently in a state of war and is experiencing significant demographic changes as well as shifts in residential living and the organisation of its industries. The impacts of the war will require the rebuilding of the country, and this presents opportunities to improve the living and working environment of Ukrainians while also introducing new sustainable solutions. There is a need to establish new strategies for spatial planning that include new technologies and broad public participation through the development of National Spatial Data Infrastructure. This paper explores the potential solutions, opportunities and risks of developing a new spatial planning approach in Ukraine.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joanna Kopacz- Gruzlewska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Role of Landscape Planning in Local Spatial Planning
Landscape planning is now a mandatory element of local spatial planning in Ukraine. Introduced as part of recent planning reforms, it is now required in Comprehensive Spatial Development Plans for Hromadas. Based on the German methodological model, the Ukrainian approach has been adapted to local conditions. This article draws on the author’s practical experience to explore how landscape plans are developed and integrated into comprehensive plans. It provides examples from selected Hromadas, analyses how environmental objectives are reflected in final planning decisions, and discusses regulatory and practical challenges. The conclusions reveal key factors influencing integration, including legal clarity, data availability, coordination, and public engagement.
Copyright (c) 2025 Oleksandr Golubtsov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In Ukraine, with the Russian invasion that started in 2022 still ongoing, the issue of considering a controlled shrinking strategy has become increasingly urgent when looking at the possible population scenario identified by the Mykolaiv Masterplan. Rather than considering the best-case scenario, we must consider the worst-case and baseline scenarios of demographic change. Planning for stagnation and decline must be prioritised to reduce disparities and enable sustainable development. This paper presents possible demographic scenarios for Mykolaiv after the war, along with their socioeconomic effects. We have chosen the city of Mykolaiv because of its unique characteristics. It has emerged as a crucial defence city for Ukraine since 2014. In light of the Russian invasion of 2022, securing access to Odesa and the wider southern coastline is especially important. Furthermore, Mykolaiv has experienced ongoing demographic shrinkage; exacerbated by the war. Within this context, we map the geography of knowledge produced by smart shrinkage, and reflect on the leading causes, strategies, consequences, contradictions, and opportunities. Our research questions are whether and how these strategies can be applied to the mounting recovery challenges in Mykolaiv.
Copyright (c) 2025 Agim Kërçuku, Dimitris Manoukas, Austėja Makarevičiūtė, Ilaria Mariotti, Federica Rossi, Audrone Sadauskaite https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Similar and Distinctive Features of Urban Development Analysis
The challenges facing Ukrainian cities today require a thorough analysis of their socio-economic development. This article proposes developing a clearer toolkit for assessing the ability of individual cities to build their economic capacity and sustainability, based on studying the socio-economic situations of urban territorial communities from different regions within Ukraine. Based on estimates of socio-economic status, an algorithm was worked out to assess this development. Taking into account the integrative nature of urban policymaking, the framework, mechanisms, and instruments of such a policy were developed, and a scheme was built to link scenarios, strategies, and instruments of urban policy. These can be applied to urban territorial communities at different stages of development. In this study, we relied on available statistical data. However, in practice, we encountered fragmented and incomplete data, particularly regarding the migration patterns of internally displaced persons, their potential contributions to given individual city’s economies, and the impact of displacement on urban planning. This made it impossible to address the challenges of maintaining security, building resilience, and developing urban planning visions. To conduct a thorough analysis of cities’ resilience to challenges while also needing to maintain security, we propose expanding the range of municipal statistical data and updating the statistical observation methodology. The practical significance of this study lies in the possibility of applying the proposed approaches to collecting and processing data on urban development and modelling scenarios and strategies for developing urban policies in Ukrainian cities with similar development conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on complying with the principles of sustainability, security, and smartification when developing urban policies for Ukrainian cities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Olga Shevchenko, Nataliia Kuzmynchuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Planning Regional Reconstruction amidst Conflict: Balancing Territorial Governance in (Post-)War Ukraine
This article analyses the challenges of regional reconstruction in scenarios of ongoing conflict and deepens existent understanding of the multivariate patterns of (post-)war spatial policy making. Using a case study approach, the article points to situations where the existing institutional structure of decision-making at the territorial community (hromadas) level cannot overcome all consequences of the war in Ukraine. The paper argues that matching (post-)war reconstruction measures with the new functionalities of hromadas, their institutional capacity, level of destruction, resilience, and subjectivity will maximise support for bottom-up initiatives, while adaptively and flexibly supplementing them, where necessary, with a top-down approach.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daria Malchykova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Olympic Village as a catalyst for Urban Transformation in the South of Buenos Aires
Urban developments resulting from mega-events have generated divergent territorial outcomes, ranging from market-driven restructuring to more integrated forms of urban regeneration. In Buenos Aires, the 2018 Youth Olympic Games led to the development of the Olympic Village in Comuna 8, a historically disadvantaged and fragmented area of the city. This article examines how the Olympic Village was reinterpreted as a catalyst for a broader territorial vision of the city’s southern area. Using a qualitative, interpretative, and ex post case-study approach, it analyses planning documents and empirical materials produced during the formulation of strategic visions between 2022 and 2025. The paper defines a catalyst as an intervention that enables the development and scaling of planning frameworks and institutional arrangements, rather than one that directly produces spatial transformation. From this perspective, the Olympic Village functioned as a methodological and institutional pilot case. The findings indicate a partial and conditional success: while the experience contributed to reframing planning approaches, its spatial effects remain limited and dependent on ongoing implementation capacity and metropolitan coordination. The article shows that catalytic interventions in fragmented contexts operate primarily through institutional and methodological transformation rather than immediate territorial change.
Copyright (c) 2026 Joaquín Tomé, Carolina Chantrill, Micaela Alcalde, Luciana Pacheco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Managing the Temporal Complexity of Urban Projects
This article examines the role of temporalities in complex urban projects using the case study of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Based on interviews and document analysis, it develops a method, that we call the ‘timeline’, which highlights how heterogeneous temporalities are coordinated throughout project management. The paper argues that coordination is not given but progressively built through instruments, interactions between actors, and shared frames of reference. The Olympic programme is thus understood as a set of interdependent action systems whose temporal alignment is not given in advance but emerged as a result of the project. The article contributes to planning theory by conceptualising the urban project as a mechanism for coordinating multiple temporalities in situations of uncertainty.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alain Bourdin, Helene Dang Vu, Joel Idt, Jules Meunier https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Spatial Planning and Sustainability in the Application of the Olympic Agenda 2020
Growing concerns over the sustainability of sports mega-events have reduced the number of cities willing to host them. In response, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched Agenda 2020 in 2014 to reform the extant Olympic bidding process. It aims to encourage the use of existing or temporary venues and adaptive spatial strategies which minimize environmental and financial burdens. This paper investigates how Agenda 2020 has reshaped the spatial and environmental dimensions of Olympic planning by comparing Paris 2024 and Milano Cortina 2026; the first Summer and Winter Games fully organized under this framework. Through comparative case study analysis, the paper examines the relationship that exists between global sustainability goals and local planning practices, focusing on the spatial logics, legacy strategies, as well as the plans of the Saint-Denis and Porta Romana Olympic Villages. The study demonstrates that while Agenda 2020 promotes more flexible and territorially distributed configurations–diffused and constellation models–in its two applications, it tends to favour already wellequipped regions and produces uneven environmental and social outcomes. Despite the progress achieved through the new Agenda, the findings highlight the contradictions that exist between the IOC’s sustainability discourse and the territorial realities of host cities and regions. In so doing, it offers insights for future megaevent planning and policy design under conditions of environmental pressure and hosting-requirement constraints.
Copyright (c) 2026 Abdallah Jreij, Zachary M. Jones, Davide Ponzini, Stefano Di Vita https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper examines the post-Games legacy of Olympic Cities (focusing on the case of Athens 2004), situating mega-events as catalysts for urban transformation. It interrogates motivations beyond economics—psychological factors and city identity—while debating whether bigger cities hold the advantage. Integrating temporal frameworks, it analyses opportunities: infrastructure, global positioning, community engagement, and city branding strategies. It balances these against dilemmas like overemphasis on flagship projects, sustainability challenges, and underutilised facilities. Drawing also on cases from Munich, Barcelona, London, and Paris, it examines the impact of scale on hosting capacity and civic identity. The analysis of Athens 2004 details planning decisions, infrastructure achievements, cost overruns, and varied legacies—sporting, social, urban, and economic. Post-games venue repurposing efforts highlight successes and failures in sustainability and community integration. The paper concludes by advocating (among others) integrated legacy planning, city branding, scalable processes, and prioritising civic pride and quality of life to maximise benefits and mitigate risks for future hosts.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alex Deffner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
French planning is characterized by a persistent duality, wherein a centralized regulatory framework coexists with flexible, design-driven, project-based practices. The analysis in this paper situates these developments within the broader evolution of French planning, tracing the transition from postwar centralization to decentralization and ecological transition. It addresses the separation which exists between statutory planning and project delivery via Zones d’Aménagement Concerté (ZACs), the emergence of the projet urbain as a negotiated design practice, and the rise of tactical urbanism since the 2000s. By engaging with five contemporary trajectories in architecture and planning—from post-urbanism to political contextualism—the paper contends that effective planning must integrate spatial rationality, local specificity, and political agency, while acknowledging power and resource asymmetries. The conclusion advocates for strategic incrementalism, suggesting that the future of French planning relies on transforming the plan-project duality from a structural constraint into a productive tension that supports adaptive, equitable, and democratic urban development.
Planners' ideals and realities : Normative behaviour and conformorality
People often make presumptions about planners – rational, altruistic, self-interested, bureaucratic, and so on. However, what is a realist portrait of planning practitioners? What normative dispositions do they tend to adopt, why do they adopt them, and how they behave based on them? To shed light on these questions, this study explores the normative behaviour of planning practitioners. A meta-ethnography was conducted focusing on 19 empirical studies relevant to the normative behaviour of English local authority planners from 1978 to 2022. The paper’s synthesis of the same revealed prominent normative frameworks within the planning community across different social-temporal contexts. The findings highlight consistent normative features among planners: a deep internalisation of a moderately progressive professional ideal and a strong identification with the planning profession. These results indicate a widespread phenomenon of conformorality within the planning profession, with planners frequently facing challenges when it comes to adhering to two sets of norms: the bureaucratic, and the professional. The study also discusses different mechanisms that contribute to the achievement and maintenance of planners’ conformorality, including compliance, identification, and internalisation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Qingyuan Guo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conformorality and the Economic Urbanism of Jane Jacobs
The renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs made radical and important criticisms of and contributions to both economics and urban planning. Yet, while her contributions to planning have been embraced and admired, her contributions to economics have been mostly overlooked by the economics profession as well as by most of her ardent supporters. Contrasting the strength of conformorality in each of these disciplines may provide part of the explanation, and comparing the experience of Jacobsian economics with market-process economics can shed additional light.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sanford Ikeda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
To plan or not to plan? Is this the question?
Few articles within planning debates have generated both indignation and fascination like the Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. The idea of the Non-Plan is to embrace a more experimental approach to spatial planning by observing what would happen if people were free to choose how to transform their living environments. As this paper shows, practitioners and scholars have perceived the utility and applicability of the Non-Plan proposals in somewhat ambiguous ways. In their iconoclastic essay, Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price criticise traditional planning schemes while revealing the different ideologies involved in – and enacted by – the quest for designed orders. Current levels of interest and momentum surrounding the proliferation of ‘plans for societies’ in contemporary discourses make the idea of Non-Plan still fascinating and worth considering. The reactions that the Non-Plan have sparked may be a warning for mavericks of past, present and future generations.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anita De Franco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Deal-making cities in Latin America : Why we should pay less attention to master plans
This paper challenges traditional planning paradigms by examining the tensions that exist between planning as a public process and the plan as an instrument. We explore the concept of conformorality, whereby individuals adhere to specific moral values to gain social acceptance within their groups, and influence urban conflicts and policy outcomes. Through this framework, we analyse the complex interactions that exist between planning, public interest, and moral considerations. By using the Urban Intervention Projects (UIPs) case in São Paulo, we demonstrate how moral factors influence negotiations and policy implementation in urban governance. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the moral dimension within planning studies, and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches to the field, as well as new attitudes toward necessary changes.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paulo Nascimento Neto, Clovis Ultramari, Mario Prokopiuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conformity is the tendency to modify one’s behaviour to match the behaviour of others. Lisciandra et al. (2013) introduced the concept of conformorality to refer to the susceptibility of moral judgements to conformity. While it is often suggested that conformorality is generally bad, recent interdisciplinary work indicates that conformorality can also promote epistemically and morally positive outcomes under certain conditions. In the literature, little attention has been paid to the geometry of urban spaces. Here we combine results from the philosophy and psychology of conformity with general insights from urban studies to distinguish three ways in which the geometry of urban spaces might relate to conformorality, namely: urban spaces can exemplify, afford, or constitute conformorality. This paper’s analysis contributes a more nuanced understanding of the different faces of conformorality, as well as their bearing on urban planning and city living.
Copyright (c) 2024 Matteo, Chiara Lisciandra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The 'conformorality' of residential displacement debates
Much scholarly discourse about the problems of and solutions to urban residential displacement has tended towards ‘conformorality’ and, in so doing, has overlooked certain key aspects for study. First, there has been a lack of interest in explaining the complex motives of displacers. Second, certain solutions to displacement have become so commonly espoused that their negative aspects have been obscured. Third, addressing these issues, this paper suggests new ways to confront ‘conformorality’ by encouraging scholars to engage with the deeper ethical and normative questions about displacement solutions that have, hitherto, not often been addressed. Through exploring these rarely discussed topics, scholars may be able create new or improved responses to displacement that target inherent issues.
Copyright (c) 2024 Brett Slack https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This themed issue on “conformorality” is inspired by the work of Chiara Lisciandra, Marie Postma-Nilsenová, and Matteo Colombo (2013), which explores the tendency of individuals within a particular group or community to align with certain ideologies and values. The term “conformorality”, which combines the concepts of “conformity”, “conformism”, and “morality”, was first introduced into planning debates by Claudia Basta, the former coordinator of the AESOP Thematic Group on Ethics, Values, and Planning, in her thought-provoking presentation entitled “Unequal, thus Unjust?”. This presentation was delivered at a research seminar entitled “The Just City in Practice: Operationalising a Broad and Varied Concept,” which was held on August 21, 2020 in The Hague after the long period of social distancing that had been enforced due to COVID-19 restrictions. In Basta’s presentation, conformorality represented the widespread sentiment that exists between planning scholars that economic inequality equates to injustice; she discussed the limitations of this uncritical attitude.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stefano Cozzolino, Anita De Franco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Future-orientated thinking needs to be strengthened in planning and policy making to respond to the challenges posed by ‘presentism’. Despite the inherent uncertainty of the future, effective planning and policy making require the ability to envision potential future developments and implications of today´s decisions. The ’tragedy of the time horizon’ emphasises the detrimental effects of short-term thinking on various domains, including the environment, economic stability, and social equity. It encompasses the multifaceted challenges posed by short-term thinking and the neglect of long-term consequences. To combat this, we must boost our future literacy, i.e. the capacity to imagine, read, and use the future, both at the individual and societal levels. Future literacy is vital for navigating uncertainty, making strategic decisions, embracing innovation, enhancing social resilience, and promoting sustainable development. This requires a collective effort to improve future literacy skills, foster imagination and creativity, and overcome the challenges of ‘the tyranny of now’. Envisioning positive futures is crucial for inspiring hope, collaboration, and informed decision-making, particularly in a rapidly changing world.
Copyright (c) 2023 Böhme Kai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper attempts to develop a novel insight into Hannah Arendt’s socio-political theories in order to examine and alleviate the socio-spatial exclusion of the vulnerable by greater society. It utilises Arendt’s classification of the terms ‘communal’ and ‘irrelevant’ as a pair of opposing concepts in which the state of ‘vulnerability’ is associated with being deemed to be ‘irrelevant’ within society. The study addresses the exclusionary qualities of public spaces by focusing on the complex relationships observed between these concepts in Turkey through a content analysis of 35 national satire magazines and 30 YouTube channels that reflect on various states and perceptions of vulnerability in Turkish society and culture. It concludes with a series of recommendations by which to close the gap within the communal-irrelevant duality that could enhance vulnerable individuals’ urban rights.
Copyright (c) 2023 Basak Akarsu, Imge Akcakaya Waite, Cansu Ozmen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Public spaces serve as the sensory system of urban life, and are crucial for interconnecting individuals, ideas, and cultures within the fabric of cities. This study provides a fresh interpretation of public spaces by examining people’s activities from a new perspective. By applying play theory to public space analysis, the study uncovers spontaneous and unplanned activities and the novel relationships which exist between users and their environments. In so doing it paves the way for a new approach to public space design. With a focus on Aachen as a place of play, this study seeks to develop urban design tools that take into account users’ leisure time activities. By recognizing the unique relationships that play can create between individuals and their surroundings in terms of perceptions, intentions, actions, and uses of space, the research encourages a fresh perspective on urban design tools. Ultimately, the findings of this study offer a new design approach for creating public spaces that are more participating, inclusive, and user-centred.
Copyright (c) 2023 Pelin Isik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0