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.
Administrative leadership plays a critical role in navigating institutional complexity in urban planning, yet remains underdeveloped in planning research. This study examines how administrative leadership is practiced and articulated in public-private planning contexts under conditions of institutional tension. Drawing on 38 interviews with public- and private-sector professionals in Finland, the analysis identifies tensions and the leadership practices that navigate them. The findings show that administrative leadership is often enacted without being explicitly named, rendering it institutionally present but discursively muted. The article contributes to planning theory by foregrounding administrative leadership as an organizational dimension of statutory planning governance.
Planning decisions are frequently impeded by an inadequate understanding of complex urban environments, necessitating data-driven and creative strategies. Based on a developed research question on this need, this study proposes a tool founded in the literature on strategic planning, sustainable development, and planning system innovation. The proposed tool depicts the components and interactions within urban ecosystems. The study employs the public transport sector as a case study to demonstrate the operationalization of the tool in Munich, Budapest, and Prague. The demonstration shows how the tool may better inform and support strategic urban planning decisions.
The performative role of visualisations, particularly photorealistic renderings, has been acknowledged in planning literature. However, how planners engage with them remains understudied. This paper explores how they perceive and manage the performative functions of renderings as part of broader storytelling in urban planning. Drawing on observational and interview data from a Finnish planning case and using urban planning renderings as our supplementary data, we identify three key approaches: persuasion, avoiding closure, and managing expectations. For planners, the challenge lies not only in using images effectively, but also in navigating and controlling their influence throughout the planning process.
This paper examines the relationship between rail transit and urban growth by revisiting Tokyo's new towns, regarded as global exemplars of transit-oriented development. It identifies paradoxes in transit-served new towns and refines a historical institutionalist approach to their planning. In greater Tokyo, the alignment of rail transit, residential use, and private investment shaped three planned new towns, thereby situating them and metropolitan sprawl in the same urban property system. The new towns are transit-dependent without achieving self-containment. They rely on path-dependent institutions and exhibit contingent urban forms, illustrating rail transit as a multifaceted process rather than a panacea in planning.
The equitable distribution of infrastructure is a central concern of planning theory and practice. Developing an inter-urban comparison of bicycle equity policies in Mexico City and Toronto, the paper leverages their distinct intra-urban differences to examine how planners prioritize sites for intervention, evaluate situated impacts, and adapt infrastructure configurations. Foregrounding how sociomaterial context mediates infrastructure provision, the paper identifies tensions between greater distributional equity and the pursuit of equal conditions. This analysis suggests that critical attention to the logics and practices whereby programmes of infrastructure provision are extended and adapted can contribute to equitable infrastructure planning and inclusive urban development.
Scholars have showed how an emerging climate urbanism places carbon mitigation at the center of urban policy, yet limited attention has been devoted to its ramifications for planning and the role of planners. In this paper, we trace how planning practices informed by climate urbanism are taking hold across Swedish municipalities, principally reflected by the uptake of carbon accounting. We demonstrate that while there are many merits to these techniques, they present significant challenges for planners and the planning process. We combine contributions to scholarship on climate urbanism and the role of planners with suggestions for responses to these challenges.
This paper examines the social learning process among a group of community resident and academic researchers working together on a Participatory Action Research study exploring the relationship between urban development and community health. Through a reflective case study of our collaborative data analysis team's work, we highlight key social learning dynamics on our team, as well as key enabling conditions that fostered social learning. We offer considerations for intentionally designing social learning processes to enhance the contributions of community engagement in research and practice, and explore the implications of our findings for strengthening the relationship between knowledge and action in planning.
This paper discusses how everyday practices within a municipal organisation contribute to the gap between strategic and operational spatial planning. We use reduced residential segregation as an example of a cross-sectoral issue which is known to be difficult to operationalise within planning practice. Through an ethnographic case study in Sweden, we provide an insider perspective on the hybrid organisational landscape, focusing on three groups of practitioners. Our results show how these practitioners navigate between parallel governance ideas and roles, and identify an organisational deadlock in which no one works proactively to reduce residential segregation through spatial planning.
Despite growing recognition of time in planning research, few studies explore the role of time in participatory planning contexts. Drawing on critical temporal scholarship, this paper develops an analytical framework, which centers temporal multiplicity, power, and conflicts. It aids planners in identifying, examining, and diagnosing the diverse temporalities - such as rhythms, timings and tempos - that shape participatory planning, to support more equitable and meaningful processes that address temporal concerns and build adaptive capacity. We apply the framework to an empirical illustration, which reveals that temporal differences can both impede collaborations and create opportunities for reflection and mutual learning.
Despite more than a decade of automated vehicle trials on public roads, the anticipated driverless revolution has yet to materialise. Nevertheless, cities have been urged to manage the transition. This article examines the merits of proactive planning, analysing automated vehicle initiatives in Toronto. Employing a framework for social innovation in planning practice, I demonstrate how, over a ten-year period, municipal planners gradually introduced organizational and practice-based changes. Proactive efforts have strengthened institutional responsiveness and directed the private sector-driven transition towards local needs. While transformative change has been restrained, foundations are laid for a purposeful shift towards new logics of action.
This paper argues that the emergence of new frontiers of smart transformation, such as underground spaces, can pose significant challenges to the implementation of "smart" technological solutions. Exploring the case of Singapore's Digital Underground initiative, we show that elements such as material complexity, co-ordination between stakeholders, and the availability of appropriate regulatory and administrative frameworks can problematize the implementation of subterranean smart initiatives. By considering multistakeholder perspectives on these "more-than-technological" factors, this paper offers lessons for urban planners, policymakers, and developers in cities around the world that are keen to leverage technology to unlock the potential of underground space.
I examine the use of prior plans for reflection and learning when developing new comprehensive plans in selected U.S. communities. Using a conceptual framework of plan influences, survey data, and interviews with planning professionals, I find that while prior plans serve as reference points, planners prioritize engagement and emerging policy concerns over substantive reflection. Structural constraints and overlapping planning efforts further limit reflective practices. I conclude by suggesting conditions necessary for embedding reflection in planning processes, emphasizing the need for procedural supports, planner autonomy, and organizational learning to bridge past intentions with future planning outcomes.
To bridge social and economic disparities in remote rural China, substantial government investments target rural revitalization; though many initiatives fail to engage villagers. This case study explores mechanisms for promoting villager participation and the role of planners through action-based research in Hongtang Village, where a 'small garden' was co-created as adaptive participation infrastructure. Findings show that co-creation fosters engagement by activating willingness, building opportunities, and creating pathways. Planners go beyond technical roles, acting as facilitators, educators, and coordinators. This study contributes to planning theory by demonstrating how spatial micro-interventions can foster participation in state-led rural governance.
