Editorial introduction
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What is so special about the pair of words 'spatial planning'? Is there any difference when we just say 'planning', without adding the word spatial? After all, planning in its essence is spatially bounded. Planning thought and action are depended upon space, namely: cities, regions, metropolitan areas, neighborhoods, shanty-towns, streets, highways, roads, forests, nature reserves, and even the sea shores. Planning as a discipline and as a profession was developed as an integral part of modernity,...
Research article
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In her 2010 book, The Just City, Susan Fainstein evaluates justice in her case-study cities (Amsterdam, New York and London) though a three dimensional analysis of justice (Equity, Diversity and Democracy). Her approach, popular among Western scholars, cannot be replicated as such in disadvantaged cities such as Bujumbura because of the important processes happening outside the formal institutional and policy frameworks. The main claim of this article is that justice cannot be evaluated in such contexts without taking into consideration the informal. Through a multi-scalar analysis of...
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With the rise of neoliberal economy in Europe, decent urban housing has become unaffordable for many Europeans in recent decades. This has further produced socio-economic pressure on urban-policy makers across the continent. In post-socialist countries such as Serbia, neoliberal development has generally been merged with post-socialist transformation, making them more vulnerable to the deficiency of affordable housing. Moreover, Serbian housing has also been impacted by a distinct socialist housing model and a turbulent recent history. Therefore, housing planning and policy in Serbia...
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Urban societies were greatly affected by the economic crisis in Europe and the politics of austerity that were imposed on them. Urban austerity regimes also turned public space, a common good, into a commodity. In the face of these developments citizen initiatives have produced public spaces alternative to hegemonic urban planning, alternative in their development process, their programme and values. This paper has the aim to analyse the material effects of the crisis on cities and the transformations the governance of public space has undergone. Case studies from Madrid and Berlin give...
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This paper introduces a new perspective to recognize the urban social innovation executed by researchers and initiators as "Urban Trojan" in the urban system. It analyses different approaches taken by researchers/initiators to overcome barriers between the public authorities, the community, and the initiators/researchers themselves to execute urban solutions to societal problems. The analysis adopts three approaches to deal with the public authorities presented by Jessy Marsh, the editor of the “Citizen-Driven Innovation” guidebook of good practice on open and participatory approaches to...
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The following article explores the interdependency between urban crisis as a pre-condition for self-organised responses to it and self-organised projects that try to provide solutions for problems caused by the respective crisis. Berlin is taken as specific field of investigation as self-organisation is very much linked to its recent history and it therefore seems to be a very relevant case for this topic. The example of the International Building Exhibition 1984/1987 in Berlin (IBA 84/87) is studied as a historic reference to provide a framework for comparing more recent processes with...
