This article examines the transformation of the treasury function within AESOP, the Association of European Schools of Planning, during the 2021-2025 mandate, in which the authors served respectively as treasurer and assistant treasurer. Drawing on internal reports, audit documents, governance materials, and the legacy of AESOP's earlier digital transition through AEKOM (AESOP KnOwledge Management and Sharing), a threeyear project launched in 2019 after preparatory work beginning in 2017-2018, the paper argues that recent treasury reform should be understood as part of a broader process of institutional capacity building. This process is visible not only in financial reorganisation, but also in the association's infrastructural, normative, and constitutional development: the open-source digital infrastructures initiated through AEKOM, the approval of the 2024 AESOP Core Curriculum, and the 2023 update of the AESOP Charter. Against this background, the article shows that the treasury increasingly operates at the intersection of stewardship, compliance, infrastructural maintenance, and strategic governance. The most technocratic aspects of financial management - including membership-fee administration, payment flows, accounting closure, filings, banking, VAT treatment, traceability, and auditable procedures - are better handled through external professional services. By contrast, strategic functions concerning reserves, priorities, inter-organisational positioning, and long-term institutional orientation should remain with the Executive Committee under the authority of CoRep. The article concludes that, for transnational academic associations in Europe, professionalising technical financial management can strengthen rather than weaken institutional autonomy, provided that strategy remains anchored in the association's mission, constitutional framework, digital infrastructures, and collective governance.
One of the shortcomings of international comparative planning research is the lack of reflection on the strategy of country comparison. While comparative typologies can be helpful, how are they used in the research process? This article critically examines a study that compared the regional governance of land-use planning in Germany and Switzerland. The results demonstrate that certain factors, such as the availability of data, only become apparent during the research process and require a flexible approach to the initial strategic considerations. Therefore, typologies cannot be finalised at the outset of the research process; rather, they require enhancement throughout.
This paper offers an alternative reading of the claim that the world is turning urban, treating it as a sign of a deeper shift in how the urban is conceived, governed, and imagined, beyond spatial or demographic accounts.As the world turns urban describes processes shaped by political forces and forms of knowledge across overlapping arenas and highlights the entanglement of social, technical, and political practices through which the urban emerges as an epistemic field.This perspective raises questions of who knows, represents, and transforms the city, and how regimes of knowledge produce partially converging, constantly reconfiguring urban realities. Planning is embedded in this transformation, widening its frame from shaping physical space to mediating between algorithmic models, institutional routines, and collective imaginaries. The global city is thus continuously enacted through translation, simulation, and affective infrastructures. The task is to rethink planning as a reflexive and situated practice that interrogates its epistemic conditions within shifting knowledge orders and urban futures discourse.
Looking at two modes of densification in Gauteng, South Africa, we examine the attitudes, responses and agendas of number of urban actors to "hard" and "soft" densification. Based on several years of field work, we demonstrate how the "quiet" densification of individual entrepreneurs who build rooms for rent on their properties often receive a variety and uneven set of state responses despite their market appeal and ability to provide decent accommodation. We contrast this form of densification against large scale public-private partnerships, which have numerous management and quality of life issues post-occupancy but remain the prefered mechanism of densification by the state. Our work engages relooks and these modes of densification and goes far beyond increases in numbers, buildings or populations. Our cases are revealing of the urban imaginaries, politics and agendas that are at work behind the policy responses to densification and show how densification is not just about meeting housing needs on the ground and the business of supply and demand but also how the state sees itself, its partners and the cities that it is trying to imagine into being.
Interventions in European landscape architecture have gained in importance in recent decades as a method for open space development in cities. However, it is difficult to draw a precise distinction between the term Intervention, related temporary approaches and classical planning methods in landscape architecture. In a first step, definitions of terms and the roots of today's landscape architectural interventions are examined. These can be found in art, architecture, urban planning, sociology and landscape architecture in Europe from the middle of the last century onwards. In a second step, the diversity of contemporary landscape architectural interventions is defined and categorized. By overlaying past and present interventions, seven characteristic features of landscape architectural interventions are proposed: spatial, temporary, open-ended, curated, interactive, improvised and provocative. The article aims to sharpen the concept of Intervention as a planning instrument and to anchor it more precisely in the discipline as a landscape architectural method.
In response to public spending challenges, as well as an increasing cognisance of the magnitude of asset wealth invested in land, land value capture has come to the fore as a topic of planning research, with a focus on infrastructure and affordable housing. But in addition to these investments, planning systems have long sought to channel land value into place quality via the regulation of the place standards of new development. We explore how land policy strategies and planning systems combine to direct land value uplift towards the achievement of place quality goals in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany.
This article presents the results of the research project 5G-CityVisAR that focused on the development and testing of an AR application designed to visualize urban planning designs as 3D models in a central area of the city of Schwerte, Germany. The application aims to enhance participatory processes in urban planning by providing citizens with an interactive tool for engagement. Through this project, we sought to advance AR technologies in urban planning and assess their added value for public participation. To achieve this, we first analysed established AR applications from German-speaking countries as best practice examples to derive functions and unique features for app development. We assessed the advantages and disadvantages of these applications and formulated requirements for our own application. Using four models with varying levels of detail (LOD), we visualized different design variants within the app and tested them as part of a simulated participatory process. A scientific survey was conducted to evaluate usability, the added value for active involvement in participation processes, as well as the transparency and comprehensibility of the app. The results demonstrate the benefits and added value of AR in planning participation processes, confirming that immersive presentations of models can enhance understanding of projects and increase willingness to participate. Overall, AR represents a significant opportunity for urban planning by enabling citizens to engage more autonomously in participatory processes while supporting collaborative decision-making.
Despite the growing prominence of participation in urban planning discourses, participatory practices often reproduce existing routines and power structures instead of transforming them. This paper addresses the persistent gap between the normative ambitions of participation and its limited institutional impact. It asks: Why does innovation in participatory formats rarely lead to institutional change in planning? To answer this question, the article employs discursive institutionalism (DI) to conceptualize institutions as orders of meaning that are stabilized or transformed through articulation. This theoretical lens allows for analysing how ideas of 'good participation' are negotiated and institutionalised through discourses. While DI has increasingly been applied in urban research, its conceptual use remains fragmented and methodologically underdeveloped. There is still no integrated operationalisation of the discursive mechanisms through which ideas gain institutional validity or trigger change. This paper therefore advances DI by developing an analytical framework for how discursive processes shape the persistence and transformation of participatory planning practices. Empirically, the article examines participatory urban development in the small post-industrial German town of Wittenberge, where since 2019 new collaborative formats have gained (supra-)national professional and public recognition. Drawing on qualitative interviews with administrative and civic actors and a media analysis, the study traces how local actors translate expert discourses into practice and how these translations affect institutional meanings. The findings show that institutional change in participation in urban planning is incremental, occurring through subtle shifts in discursive practices rather than formal restructuring. Building on this, the article develops an operationalisation of DI for participation in urban planning, identifying mechanisms of discursive stabilisation and transformation. The article contributes to theory and practice by (1) explaining the resilience of participation routines through discursive mechanisms, (2) identifying communicative processes that enable gradual institutional change, and (3) advances DI as a conceptual toolkit for analysing and shaping participatory planning.
This article examines the legal foundations of spatial planning through a comparative analysis of twelve countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Japan, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Turkey, and Uganda. These countries were selected for their diverse geographic, political, and socio-economic contexts. Despite significant differences, the study finds a notable convergence in how planning goals and values are expressed in law. At the same time, it identifies recurring challenges in implementing these legal provisions, including weak enforcement, institutional fragmentation, and pressures from informal development and private interests. The findings point to a set of shared legal principles that underpin spatial planning across jurisdictions, offering a basis for reflecting on the potential for more universally applicable planning norms.
There is a broad scientific and societal consensus that cities worldwide must become more ecological and climate-resilient. Land-use planning has various instruments for leverage, including conventional zoning at the municipal level and planned unit developments (PUDs) at the neighbourhood level. While they differ in their local characteristics, both instruments are used in many countries. However, their use and efficacy in facilitating sustainable urban transformation (such as the preservation and enhancement of urban trees) have been challenged. This study considered the parts of urban land parcels that are not covered by main buildings as 'tree area potentials' (TAPs) and quantitatively compared conventional zones with PUDs in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, developed before 2000. We analysed the different ground cover types (such as subsidiary buildings or traffic areas) in the TAP areas and the proportion of each TAP area comprising tree canopy - referred to as 'realised tree area potential' (rTAP). In addition, planning documents of PUDs were qualitatively assessed to determine their regulations regarding urban trees and how these regulations related to the rTAP. In general, the assessed PUDs and conventional zones could not be distinguished based on their rTAP values despite PUDs having greater flexibility to regulate open spaces. Exceptions with higher rTAP tended to have clear regulation of trees. Further research is needed to determine why the early PUDs were not more successful in preserving and enhancing trees and how this can be improved in the future.
This paper examines the phenomenon of temporary use of brownfields in European cities, exploring its potential benefits, challenges, and externalities. Brownfields, abandoned and often contaminated industrial sites, represent underutilised resources within urban landscapes. While permanent redevelopment of brownfields remains the ultimate goal, temporary use has emerged as a strategy to activate these spaces, generating social, economic, and environmental benefits in the interim. Through a review of case studies from post-communist cities in Eastern Europe as well as Western European cities with a focus on reunified Berlin, we analyse different approaches to temporary use, from spontaneous community-led initiatives to planned municipal projects. This analysis allows us to identify specific differences in approaches to temporary use projects between Eastern and Western Europe generating different benefits and externalities. The aim of the article is to identify, describe, and generalise particularly negative externalities related to various forms of temporary use of brownfields affecting their overall value, taking into account the character, place, time, and other socio-economic contexts to improve the design, implementation, and management of such projects by considering each region's unique characteristics and needs. The paper identifies key factors contributing to successful temporary use plans and strategies, such as transparent communication between stakeholders, clear time horizons, and adaptive planning approaches. Subsequently, recommendations and planning policy implications are drawn, presented as lessons to be learned. The findings reveal that while temporary use can catalyse urban regeneration and community engagement, it also presents complex challenges - planning and creating effective policies, that balance the needs of communities, owners, developers, and city authorities.
