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.
