Foreword
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It is a pleasure to write a foreword for the third volume of plaNext, dedicated to ‘Differences and Connections: Beyond Universal Theories in Planning, Urban, and Heritage Studies’. This volume publishes six papers selected from the YA conference held on this topic in Palermo in March 2015, thanks to the support of Francesco Lo Piccolo, at the time acting President of AESOP. Published since 2015, plaNext is a peer-reviewed journal, created and edited by the AESOP Young Academics Network. Since the beginning, AESOP has supported this initiative for two reasons.
Editorial introduction
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Let us open this editorial introduction in an unusual way, made possible by plaNext’s innovative approach to peer-review. Let us quote a paragraph from one of the reviews to the articles of this issue, namely the review by Marco Allegra to Ignacio Castillo Ulloa’s article.
One might suspect that this is a simplistic account of the functioning of the planning process: planners, after all, might be creative in their work; take risks (or not); simply rely on their professional expertise, but also use it in a strategic way to negotiate their role in the policy process; display a...
Research article
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This paper addresses the question of how planning research could be reasserted to balance the relationship between theory and practice. To that end, a twofold approach is taken: on the one hand, different interrelations among planning theory, research and practice are set out building on Jacques Lacan’s ‘four discourses’—the master’s, the university’s, the hysteric’s and the analyst’s. On the other hand, a process to formulate the plan regulador (local normative master plan) of a canton in southern Costa Rica is drawn upon, through storytelling, to shed light on the aforementioned...
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The proliferation of informal settlements is one of the most relevant consequences of the urbanization process that has been affecting most of the cities in the Global South. Among the different ways to cope with this issue, the regularization of informal settlements through land titling has been one of the main shared strategies that scholars and policy makers have focused on for the last twenty years. A relevant and well-known contribution concerning this issue is the one provided by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. Defined together, one of the best economists in the world, and...
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Throughout the 21st century a clear shift from hierarchical government towards network-like governance is evident in Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. A door has been opened for citizens to assert their social and political citizenship and for the public sector to systematically search for novel ways to improve and expand representative practices. Estonia may be considered a post-socialist ‘market-experiment’, as almost no urban land belongs to the public sector. Thus, all decisions related to urban spatial changes are strongly influenced by private interests. The...
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Coming from a systemic point of view, systemic constellations focus on the complex interplay of different elements in order to come to a better understanding of the whole system. Spatial planning, which involves complex decision-making in an uncertain environment, is eventually able to profit from such a different methodology. In this context, the aim of the article is to implement systemic constellations as method for spatial research in two different ways: first, to visualise questions of power in planning processes, and, second, to visualise cultural influences in planning processes....
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In contemporary urban studies, the physical reconstruction of cities is achieving a new dimension, which is reflected in the urban resilience that is expressed as the physical, social, cultural and economic capability of urban structures to respond to anthropogenic or natural catastrophes. In this paper, we study the reconstruction processes of Minsk, Belarus, which was almost completely destroyed and rebuilt as a new city after World War II, in order to understand in which way specific social and political conditions may have influence on the physical rebuilding of urban and...
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Over the past two decades, the concept of ‘urban resilience’ has gained increasing attention within the field of urban planning. More recently, interest in the concept can be partly linked to the recent global economic crisis, which has stimulated much debate around pre-crisis urban development models, and more broadly around the ability of modern planning systems to adequately adapt and respond to changing circumstances. This paper reviews the scholarly literature on urban resilience and concludes that despite its increasing ubiquity, the concept still lacks precise definition, and...
