Foreword
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I am happy to introduce the first volume of plaNext as one of the most challenging initiatives of our association. What is plaNext? plaNext is an open access online journal intellectually produced and managed by AESOP Young Academics. plaNext is published as part of the AESOP online publishing platform, InPlanning. It is an international peer- reviewed journal. It arises from the collective work of our community. And so, plaNext is many things at the same time.
Editorial introduction
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Resistance, planning and conservation may seem like parallel or combating universes – while resistance almost always entails actions against the state institutions, planning and conservation practices function typically with and within them. These seemingly disen- gaged modalities of social and political processes came together as the focus of the 8th Annual AESOP Young Academics Conference, titled “Cities that Talks” that took place in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2014. The conference theme and an impressive array of case studies reflect the recent surge of urban resistance movements in Europe...
Research article
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With the beginning of the 21st century a series of large-scale urban development projects (LUDPs) were planned alongside the transformation or modernization of federal railway stations in Vienna. Herein, in October 2012 the City of Vienna together with the landowner set the course for a telling modified urban development project: the new general concept for the former railway station Wien Nordbahnhof. Just a stone’s throw away from the city’s center a new generation of citizens will find its home close or within the typological setting of an experimental superstructure,...
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‘So, it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world, of the possibility of, really, another organization of society, and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one.’ (Alain Badiou)
The paper seeks to elaborate on the concept of hope and the possibility of a ‘politics of hope’...
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This paper seeks to enable for conceptual resistance towards a desirable urban order of ‘safe public realms’, to which the ‘planning for safety’ directly contributes. One way of engaging in that kind of resistance is by contributing to politicising the system of beliefs informing planning for safety. Planning for safety is primarily legitimised morally as the ethically right thing to do given the identified violation of a human right in the public realm, the right to freely move about in the public environment. By drawing from Mouffean agonistic political theory (2005), there is no given...
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The paper gives a critical account of the recent Italian debate on Commons concentrating on some theoretical problems, with reference to two different components: the economic research on the Commons, the juridical research on the property nature of Commons. It then puts them in parallel with the social demands arisen, articulated around the buzzword “Commons”. The mutual relationship among these components is analysed, stressing the generative aspects of the encounter between scholarship on one hand and the social, discursive use of the Commons concept on the other hand. Finally a...
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Brazil experienced, in June of 2013, the largest popular demonstrations in its recent history —an event that has been called the June Journeys. In this paper, we briefly address briefly the processes of spatial diffusion and dispersion observed during these journeys. We then reflect on how these processes relate to a politics of identity, and the strategies used by protesters to differentiate themselves from other groups, and by the State to classify the protesters in order to guide the use of police repression. Identity can, therefore, group individuals around a common struggle...
