In recent decades, a decline in youth participation has been widely documented. Existing studies identify a lack of trust between youth and professionals as a contributing factor. This paper presents empirical findings from four urban living labs - Vienna, Panev & edot;& zcaron;ys, Oslo, and Rotterdam - where different participatory approaches were tested ranging from artistic strategies to placemaking and capability development. The findings suggest that trust is an emergent, relational, and processual outcome of participatory engagement itself, which in turn fosters further participation. The paper highlights the importance of labs in shaping trust and the crucial role of intermediary actors within these spaces.
This article advances planning theory by extending critical pragmatism to a development organization. It develops a framework for understanding how practitioners may exercise discretion and expertise through four dimensions: attention to institutional history, anticipation of institutional futures, navigation of power and relations, and commitment to normative goals. Drawing on a case study of USAID's Partnership for Net Zero Cities in Mexico, this study shows how a career bureaucrat leveraged technical knowledge and bureaucratic literacy to develop an urban decarbonization program in a rural-biased agency. To address complex challenges like climate change, practitioners need normative commitments, technical competence, and bureaucratic fluency.
While walking is recognised as being good for both health and environmental sustainability, the "goods" of walking are curtailed for the many citizens who experience gender-based street harassment. There is a prominent gap in the scholarship on the impact of daytime street harassment on walkability which this work fills. Based on research from Cardiff, Wales, we show that daytime street harassment discourages users from marginalised groups from choosing walking as a transport mode, extending conceptual work on the right to everyday life.
This paper examines the gendered challenges faced by planning researchers at the outset of fieldwork, offering a reflexive and holistic analysis of researcher identity, conflicting positionalities, and the politics of representation. Drawing on my fieldwork diary, I critically revisit the research process to disrupt structural gender-based silences embedded within state-led planning regimes shaped by socio-cultural norms and developmental-state legacies in Taiwan. Through feminist reflexivity, the paper demonstrates how moments of internal tension, ethical dilemma, and embodied discomfort can evolve into sites of critical awareness and methodological growth. In doing so, it highlights reflexivity not only as a methodological tool but also as an ethical practice for challenging hierarchical and gendered power relations within planning research and practice.
This article addresses an observed gap in the plan quality evaluation literature and methodology by developing additional evaluation criteria to reflect the legislative quality of plans. The analysis of climate adaptation content in 211 Danish legally binding local plans adopted between 2000 and 2020 shows that incoherence between functional elements (purpose, content, context, and results) decreases the potential of the plans to work. Plans especially suffer from legal flaws, as plan provisions fail to meet requirements of the legal framework. The article discusses ways to interpret and address these identified barriers to achieving climate adaptation goals.
Street space transformations are increasingly being used to reduce car traffic in cities. In these processes, conflict is seen to emerge unpredictably and manifest in various, sometimes unexpected ways. We aim to contribute to the understanding of these conflicts by providing a context-specific framework for analysis, based on the assumption that conflicts over street space are potentially productive and provide learning opportunities. We develop a framework showing how conflicts evolve as urban planning, transport planning, and transition logics intersect. It clarifies what conflicts concern and why actors engage in conflict, and how we can learn from conflict.
Collaboration is considered essential for addressing social and environmental crises. This article revisits Judith Innes and David Booher's engagement with complexity science to advance a systemic strand of communicative planning theory and assess its relevance for understanding collaboration during crises. Drawing on practitioners' experiences in five Swedish municipalities during the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee mass migrations, we show how the systemic strand helps explain how collaboration unfolds across multiple interrelated formal and informal initiatives rather than a single planning process. We also identify a key limitation of the strand: its inability to capture the inevitable exercise of exclusion and authority during crisis situations.
The article discusses challenges students encounter in Community Engaged Learning (CEL) classes in urban planning, asking: How can urban planning education more effectively address CEL challenges and enhance students' preparedness for professional planning practice? Drawing on a six-year CEL course conducted with marginalized communities in two countries, the study proposes a relational approach to planning pedagogy aimed at addressing persistent obstacles in CEL. The analysis demonstrates how relational principles foster reciprocity, adaptability, and attentiveness to shifting socio-spatial dynamics in CEL, ultimately strengthening students' capacities for flexible, accountable, and context-responsive planning practice.
The paper advances a more-than-human perspective on planning events and contributes to broader understandings of public space development. It traces the transformation of the private Hollenderhagen garden in the small coastal town of Ris & oslash;r, southern Norway, into a public space, focusing on how the planning event unfolded amid chance, uncertainty, and temporal dynamics. The study also highlights the more-than-human entanglements through which a planner and an artist, together with the affordances and subtle representational roles of non-human actors, shaped the emergent publicness of Hollenderhagen.
In December 2025, a roundtable of ecologists and planners in Chicago crystallized a recurring obstacle to climate adaptation work: "We do not share the same timescales with you." This article argues that adaptation planning reproduces that mismatch by treating time as a stable container of milestones through five-year comprehensive plan cycles, zoning ordinances, electoral terms, and infrastructure design lives, even as climate change unfolds through overlapping rhythms, lag effects, and abrupt thresholds. It advances a practice-oriented framework of temporal pluralism organized around horizon, rhythm, and nonstationarity, and applies it through vignette-based analysis of three Chicago sites: Calumet's industrial sediment, Lake Michigan shoreline erosion, and the Wild Mile floating wetlands. Read together, these cases demonstrate how temporal registers can inform planning practice by rendering longue dur & eacute;e and deep time processes legible and shifting planning from fixed goalposts toward coordination and recalibration across human, ecological, and geological processes.
