Foreword
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My very first experience with AESOP happened during the second year of my PhD, when I was lucky enough to be selected for the PhD workshop in Seili Island, Finland. I remember that week of “confinement”, so to speak, in an island with a bunch of fellow students and mentors, as a turning point for my PhD. And I am referring not only to the specific inputs I received on my paper; but also to the possibility to share joys and frustrations of a starting academic life in a very horizontal environment, with students and senior researchers. That is why, when I was invited to join the 2018 PhD...
Editorial introduction
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This volume is a special issue with contributions that stem from the collaborations of the 2018 AESOP PhD workshop, held 5-8 July at Tjärö island, Sweden. The overarching aim of the workshop was to establish inclusive spaces for dialogue and collaboration between PhD students across countries and continents on issues that pertained to the AESOP’s 2018 congress theme “Making space for hope”. Furthermore the PhD students got the chance to learn from the invited mentors with long experience from the academic planning field. The theme drew from a recognition of the severe challenges facing...
Research article
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Researchers in urban planning are frequently motivated by the desire to facilitate positive social change. In seeking better ways to effect change, the researcher becomes an activist by engaging with social and environmental issues in a meaningful way to solve a problem. It is also often at this nexus where practice and academia meet, where the researcher adopts an activist role. In this paper we argue that activist research requires researchers to place themselves in one of two dominant positionalities or engagement positions: the insider or the outsider, as they join efforts with their...
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With the rise of activism and activist research, this paper explores how power relationships are involved in traditional and emerging methods used in research on activism. This question matters as research methods have the potential to both improve the capacities of activist groups and enhance knowledge of agents involved: researcher and activist. The added value of the paper is that it presents a range of methods used in research on activism, including new methods that are relatively uncommon in planning research. The second contribution of this paper is that it is based on a power...
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Activism was one of the main themes of the AESOP PhD Workshop 2018 in Karlskrona and Tjärö, Sweden. One of my presentations was about the activist roles of planners working for local governments and lay planners affiliated with civil society organizations. I have kept a close eye on the academic literature on activist planning for many years, and am still working in that sub-field of planning theory. My aim is to explore the limits of how professional planners with an activist intent can practice their line of work inside a bureaucracy, and to study how actors from the civil society can...
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One of the distinctive characteristics of urban planning as a discipline is its responsibility to educate practitioners who have to ‘go out there and get things done’. The world of planning today is seen by scholarly literature as an exciting, but also a challenging, profession in reference to the political economic framework which is dominated by authoritarianism, neoliberalism, informality, crime, fragmentation, depoliticization, and populism (see Filion, 2011; Gunder, 2010; Kunzmann, 2016; Ponzini, 2016; Ruming, 2018; Tasan-Kok & Baeten, 2011; Thornley, 2018; Sager, 2009;...
