Homelessness is now an enduring feature of cities across the globe, yet planning scholarship has been reluctant to say plainly what it owes the unhoused. In this essay, I argue that planning scholarship's engagement with homelessness reflects two connected failures. First, its analytical frameworks remain too parochial to address the global structure of informaility that creates housing precarity. Second, its normative foundations remain too thin to evaluate responses against what unhoused people need to flourish. Drawing on worlding and frameworks from the Global South, I develop a scholarly planning approach that engages urban informality and precarity as analytical categories, centers racial dispossession, and grounds its prescriptions in a capabilities framework. I propose a framework for planning scholarship that reconceptualizes homelessness through the capabilities approach, justice, and human flourishing.
Video has long served as a research tool across disciplines. In planning, film has shaped urban imaginaries, whether as a form of urban marketing by city authorities or as a mode of resistance. Increasingly, film is used to foster community engagement, but systematic analyses of participatory video (PV) for decolonizing approaches to planning are scarce. This article reviews experiences using film as a PV practice in planning and across disciplines, discussing lessons learned and arguing that when embedded within ethical, reflective frameworks, the moving image can destabilize hierarchies, foster dialogue and mutual learning, and expand epistemic pluralism in planning practice.
Climate-related migration is likely to become important demographic data for urban planning, as climate impacts increase over this century. Our systematic literature review examines current scholarship on internal climate-related migration modeling, destinations, sending and receiving communities in the United States. Based on background articles plus 30 articles in the systematic literature review, we find that climate-related migrants mostly relocate to adjacent areas, and receiving communities experience socio-infrastructural hardships. Also, modeling is not yet precise enough for local planning use. But our findings do suggest which communities are most at risk of climate-related population change and suggest directions for future research.
Resilient urban design is vital for community renewal; however, a systematic understanding of how public perceptions shape its outcomes is absent from the literature. This review synthesizes evidence on public responses to examine their facilitative and constraining roles in renewal processes. The findings highlight five core public perceptions: healing and relaxation, basic livelihood security, sense of place, equity of opportunity, and empowerment. Furthermore, the study identifies 12 key strategies for achieving positive resilient urban design outcomes. The review ultimately provides policymakers with a human-centered framework for integrating resilient design into community renewal.
Although sustainability remains an important global concern, questions persist about whether the social equity dimension of the concept is being integrated into research on the topic. This article investigates how the existing research on four popular color-themed economic frameworks—the green, orange, pink, and blue economies—engage with sustainability and how, if at all, social equity is considered within that work. Through a systematic bibliometric analysis of the Scopus database, this research identifies more than 12,000 records focusing both on sustainability and one of these four economic frameworks. Examining the patterns of equity-related concepts in these records reveals an uneven integration of social equity considerations across the frameworks: the green economy dominates in volume; the orange economy shows a proportionally higher focus on equity; the blue economy emerges as a space for justice- and access-oriented research; and the pink economy remains virtually absent from sustainability-related research. This research underscores the need for greater theoretical clarity, interdisciplinary integration, and policy-relevant research to elevate social equity as an equal pillar in global sustainability conversations related to economic development.
This study systematically reviewed 55 articles on perceived park accessibility following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines and, for the first time, proposed a three-dimensional “physical-social-individual” framework to elucidate the multifaceted outcomes on park perceived accessibility. The findings indicate that perceived accessibility, influenced by complex factors and group heterogeneity, predicts park usage outcomes more effectively than objective measures. The study underscores the need to address social equity and cultural contexts, especially in developing countries and vulnerable groups. It recommends integrating emerging assessment methods and quality-oriented park design with targeted interventions to promote inclusive urban planning and public health policies.
Public Open Spaces (POS) have been a subject of interest over the years. However, systematic investigations of their utility are limited. Evaluation of the utility of POS can help inform interventions for urban planning and design, as well as address the issues of underutilization of POS in urban areas. Utility in this context denotes the usability of POS by individuals. A systematic literature review following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines was conducted which identified 68 papers on POS research, focusing on utility, use, usability, and their corresponding factors, indicators, influence, and impact, to extract significant information. The study extracted key themes in POS literature and derived a categorized list of variables that influence POS usage. The results and findings can serve as a database for various methodological approaches, and factors and variables useful for mapping and evaluating the utility of POS, which would inform future empirical work and assist in planning and policymaking.
The field of post-disaster recovery has undergone major epistemological shifts in the past century, with disasters being redefined beyond natural phenomena to expose vulnerabilities within institutional and social systems. Despite planning being recognized as essential for building back better, this ideal remains constrained by incoherent and maladaptive post-disaster spatial intervention. Insufficient theoretical and instrumental grounding for recovery planning is a major problem. The idea of urban morphogenesis describes and prescribes adaptive and fundamental urban changes. Recognizing disaster as a morphogenetic agent of change forms the basis for morpho-resilience—a tactical and place-based planning framework for more coherent post-disaster recovery.
This literature review offers a comprehensive framework for engaging social value within property development in planning studies. It critically examines how the concept is represented in academic discourse, particularly within an increasingly market-driven planning landscape. In doing so, it addresses the limited exploration of social value in planning studies through the development of a conceptual framework structured around three dimensions: representation, management, and assessment of social value. This nuanced approach emphasizes integrating research approaches and further exploring existing tools to mobilize social value in planning practice effectively, which is vital for addressing contemporary challenges and shaping future practices.
This article explores the complex interplay between property politics and urban greening interventions, emphasizing their iterative and metabolic relationships. Using bibliographic co-occurrence and content analysis, the study identifies seven key analytic dimensions of “property-associated urban greening”: pro-development greenspace, greenspace under local politics, suburban/exurban greening, nonhuman agency in greening, post-industrial landscapes, green infrastructure, and abolitionist greenspace. Urban political ecology is proposed as a critical framework to bridge the fields of property and environmental planning. By tracing how greening is shaped by and shapes land development, this article advances an interdisciplinary dialogue on the socio-ecological dimensions of urban transformation.
