Editorial introduction
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This volume marks an important stage in plaNext. It publishes original works following an open call, as the special-issue inaugural volume was dedicated to selected contributions from the 8th AESOP-YA annual conference. With the growing interest in plaNext, we see a bright future as a leading open access journal in planning and other related fields. Thanks to the generous contribution of AESOP, all articles are openly available at AESOP’s digital platform, InPlanning, and authors do not pay any article processing fee. In this respect, we envision plaNext as an effort by the young...
Research article
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This article explores an ethical approach to urban planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. A central argument in this study is that the reality policymakers face when deciding how to pursue good (in the moral sense) actions or how to eschew bad ones is ontologically unpredictable and unstable. Unpredictability and instability are characteristics of urban assemblages, which compose and decompose affecting each other in a positive or negative way. Following Deleuze and Spinoza, this paper claims that urban composition and decomposition are good (empowering) and...
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The city of Honolulu, Hawaii is currently planning and developing a new rail transit system. While Honolulu has supportive density and topography for rail transit, questions remain about its ability to effectively integrate urban design and accessibility across the system. Every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip from origins and to destinations: transportation planning must account for pedestrian safety, comfort, and access. Ildefons Cerd ’s 19th century utopian plan for Barcelona’s Eixample district produced a renowned, livable urban form. The Eixample, with its...
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This article explores the significance of open space to the formation of local culture and identity. Rejecting any absolute categorisation of open-public and closed-private space, the essay attempts to redefine open space, in order to make it more suitable to specific case studies outside the western democratic discourse within which it is often used. Space is a process, shaping the world around it as much as it is shaped by its own circumstances. This also implies that the experience of space is highly pluralistic, a notion made exceedingly clear in the changing structure and meaning of...
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The issues of promotion and preservation of urban landscapes are increasingly gaining prominence in international cultural and political debates. These issues can lead to tensions, especially for historical cities, partly because the concept of urban landscape as an element of cultural heritage is still to be acknowledged, particularly on a legislative level. Nevertheless, as the paper highlights, this concept was theorized in Europe for the reconstruction of historical cities in the second post-war period. This paper focuses on the French and Italian debates of the post-World War II...
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Sociologists and geographers have examined immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States to discuss what types of industries immigrants enter, why some groups are more inclined to entrepreneurship than others, and how social networks influence business formation. But such analyses have generally not included considerations of how the larger geographic setting in which the immigrants operate—including the urban form, the built environment, and local economic-development efforts—affect entrepreneurial decisions. Meanwhile, immigrant settlement patterns have changed in recent decades,...
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Slums are typically perceived as substandard eyesores, corrupt, makeshift, impoverished and crime-ridden. The growing literature on resilience challenged these perceptions, and promoted new debates on their ingenuity and adaptability to overcome external circumstances. Yet these debates are often limited to short term coping and adaptive capacity of slum dwellers. In this paper we look at long-term transformation of a slum over a forty-year period. Holling’s Adaptive Cycle model is a useful tool to study the transformations occurring within a slum. The four phases of the adaptive cycle...
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Recent years have witnessed the emergence of the first EU macro-regional strategies as a new instrument for territorial governance. This paper argues that both the benefits and limitations of the macro-regional approach are largely determined by the existing territorial, political, institutional and socio-cultural context of each big transnational area. Studying the debate about macro-regionalisation of the European territorial cooperation, the paper assesses the prospects for projection of the macro-regional idea upon the Black Sea area. It analyses the complex Black Sea regional...
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Inequality is a matter of everyday life and cities are places where inequality is experienced more violently. As Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield argue, cities, particularly large metropolises are sites to generate and reproduce inequalities, a similar process seen in different parts of the world. They suggest this is a result of what they call the “urban industry”. Critical Cities Volume 3—the third in a series published by “This Is Not a Gateway” (TINAG) platform—is an attempt to explore various urban inequalities. The editors, Naik Deepa and Trenton Oldfield, are actively involved in...
