Special issue celebrating 10 Years of Planning for the Next Generation is out!
Over the past decade, plaNext – Planning for the Next Generation has grown into a platform for innovative, interdisciplinary, and future-oriented research in spatial planning and regional development. This special issue is both a celebration and a reflection, capturing the transitions that have shaped the field — and the journal — from 2015 to 2025.
The plaNext was born in 2015 to create a dedicated platform for emerging scholars and new voices in spatial planning. Ten years later, this special issue, The 10th Anniversary: plaNext and Planning in Transition, reflects on the journal’s evolution and outlines its future trajectory. Over the past decade, plaNext has accompanied, and often anticipated, shifts in the discipline. These include the climate emergency transitioning to a present crisis, new movements for social justice and spatial equity, the transformative potential of digitalization and AI on urban futures, and an increasingly fractured global planning discourse. The journal’s name underlines its core mission to focus on “planning what is next,” both for the next generation of planners and the evolving nature of planning as a discipline. The collected contributions reinterpret old debates through the lens of today’s urgencies, speaking to transitions in pedagogy, politics and planetary boundaries. They critically examine what it means to plan in an era where intergenerational justice is an existential imperative. As it enters its second decade, plaNext reaffirms its commitment to fostering a community for early-career thinkers and promoting critical, inclusive, and experimental approaches to planning knowledge and practice.
Content
I Forwards
Giancarlo Cotella
Foreword: A bright future for plaNext and the AESOP publishing platform
Sıla Ceren Varış Husar and Elisa (Lizzy) Privitera
Editorial: plaNext and planning in transition (2015–2025)
II Past, present, and future of plaNext: Reflections and predictions from founding and current editorial board members
Feras Hammami
Ethical publishing as resistance: Reflections from plaNext and the politics of knowledge and space
Simone Tulumello
For a dialectic of planning pasts and futures: Theoretical courses and recourses in conversation with Patsy Healey
Batoul Ibrahim
Grounded futures: A decade of planning through humanitarian and Southern lenses
III Founding and current editorial board members in conversation
Sıla Ceren Varış Husar, Simone Tulumello, Asma Mehan, Francesca Dal Cin, Nadia Caruso, Ender Peker and Esra Kut Görgün
Bridging generations: A decade of open peer review and collective knowledge-building in planning scholarship through plaNext
Elisa (Lizzy) Privitera, Pavel Grabalov, Milan Husár, Francesca Leccis, Mafalda Madureira, Subhashree Nath, Lauren Uğur, Chandrima Mukhopadhyay and Sıla Ceren Varış Husar
Empowering scholarship: Young researcher-led journals as spaces for learning, envisioning, and experimenting with alternatives
Esra Kut Görgün and Subhashree Nath
Echoes of a decade in plaNext – Next Generation Planning journal and the road ahead
IV Voices from young academics and AESOP on future planning challenges and directions
Alberto Bortolotti
Financialization and deterritorialization in the Milanese major urban development projects
Lorenzo Stefano Iannizzotto and Alexandra Paio
Rethinking the In-Between: Designing with a socio-ecological approach to activate the potential of Terrain Vague spaces
Peter Ache
Artificial intelligence and the planning task
Ender Peker
Framing the values of teaching urban design in planning education
Elisa (Lizzy) Privitera
Planning ahead: Toward a critical, environmental, just, and action-oriented planning theory, practice, and journal
