This study examines how climate and environmental change are integrated into the required core curricula of 16 Planning Accreditation Board (PAB)-accredited undergraduate planning programs in the U.S., encompassing 232 core courses through a systematic review. It asks: How, and to what extent, are climate and environmental change integrated and covered in planning programs and curricula? Using content analysis of course titles and descriptions, along with an alignment with PAB’s Required Knowledge and Skills of the Profession, the study identifies uneven coverage across knowledge domains, with five programs integrating sustainability and environmental content across five or six of the six PAB’s competency areas, while seven do so in only one or two areas. Based on the analysis, the study develops a typology of curricular approaches. Building on these findings, the study proposes three strategies to strengthen the integration and coverage of climate and environmental change across planning curricula for undergraduate programs.

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.

This paper examines how tools from Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) can be adapted to strengthen sustainability and climate change education in urban planning. Drawing on a literature review of eighty-three HESD articles, it identifies a relational perspective that foregrounds nature and the environment as a foundational pedagogical orientation. From this review, the paper highlights four key pedagogies-interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, reflexivity, project-based learning, and role-playing games-discussing how they can be adapted into planning curricula to better prepare future planners to address sustainability challenges, and particularly climate change, in diverse urban and regional contexts.

Problem, research strategy, and findingsDespite direct calls to engage with nonrepresentational thinking (NRT) for urban planning analyses, the field has largely remained disconnected from it, unlike human geography, where NRT has gained substantial traction. This research probed into the potentials of NRT for urban planning and the puzzle of its limited presence. To assess its relevance, I conducted a literature search of leading urban planning journals, identifying and reviewing articles that explicitly engaged with NRT. In addition, I conducted 13 in-depth interviews with editors of urban planning and human geography journals. These interviews revealed five interrelated explanations for the disciplinary gap, offering nuanced insights into the evolution of urban planning, its objectives, and its scholarly dynamics. Building on these findings, I propose that the concept of disciplinary legitimacy-urban planning's dual imperative to produce knowledge that informs planning practice and planning education-offers a critical complementary explanation for the field's relative disconnect from NRT. Limited by its scope, the study did not provide empirical evidence for the usage of NRT in planning pedagogy.Takeaway for practiceUrban planning's disciplinary legitimacy rests on its dual imperative to generate knowledge that informs planning practice and education. NRT offers planners conceptual and practical tools to better navigate uncertainties and socio-spatial complexities in present-day cities, enriching planning education and practice.

Amidst major urbanization and technologization processes, scholars have been seeking innovative concepts and methods for studying urban environments and settings. Behavioral mapping was developed in the 1970s by environmental psychologists. However, despite its potential to address new challenges, the method remains relatively underdeveloped in the field of urban planning. This paper juxtaposes the new objectives of urban planning with the qualities of behavioral mapping to discuss the method’s relevance for studying dynamic urban environments. Drawing on case studies of complex urban settings of different scales (a community park and a hospital), we offer a systematic analysis of applying behavioral mapping in urban planning and conclude about the use of the methods and its potential to address contemporary challenges faced by urban planners.

Amidst major urbanization and technologization processes, scholars have been seeking innovative concepts and methods for studying urban environments and settings. Behavioral mapping was developed in the 1970s by environmental psychologists. However, despite its potential to address new challenges, the method remains relatively underdeveloped in the field of urban planning. This paper juxtaposes the new objectives of urban planning with the qualities of behavioral mapping to discuss the method's relevance for studying dynamic urban environments. Drawing on case studies of complex urban settings of different scales (a community park and a hospital), we offer a systematic analysis of applying behavioral mapping in urban planning and conclude about the use of the methods and its potential to address contemporary challenges faced by urban planners.

In this article, we present a novel approach to studying how air pollution (AP) shapes environmental activism in urban-metropolitan contexts, drawing on geographies of affect. We focus on how people engage with AP affectively, through bodily, sensory, and emotional experiences, and highlight its powerful yet differential affective capacities to prompt activism. Through qualitative analysis of social media and interviews, we present two ‘scenes’ of AP activism across the Tel Aviv metropolitan region: residents attending to bus emissions in a marginalized inner-city neighborhood and to illegal waste-burnings in the mixed Jewish-Arab metropolitan edges. We offer a fine-grained reading of how affective atmospheres of pollution induce political agency both individually and collectively; and how, through spatially and temporally dynamic relations, they interact with broader political-ecological settings to direct activism in socially inclusionary/exclusionary paths. Our analysis highlights a distinct ‘affective politics’ of AP that differs from established approaches to environmental politics.

Present day cities are highly diverse and include ongoing socio-spatial transformations. Attending to recent calls made within urban planning literature to draw on relational, nonrepresentational approaches to better attend to current cities dynamics, this paper suggests three adapted qualitative methods to the study of socio-spatial relations. The paper draws on three empirical case studies of diverse urban settings (the international airport and high-rise residential complexes) in which traditional qualitative methods were adjusted to attune to 'affects' in socio-spatial research: sense-oriented observations; experiential walking tours; and in-depth in situ interviews. The paper discusses the benefits and disadvantages of each of these methods and reconsiders the knowledge that can be derived from socio-spatial studies in urban planning for better urban futures. The paper advances the development of a solid nonrepresentational framework in urban planning to derive nuanced understandings of diverse urban experiences in rapidly changing cities, and planning which is more attentive to multiplicities, transformations, and complexities. For nonrepresentational scholars, the paper contributes to the search of affective methodologies empirical examples utilizing qualitative methods which were adjusted to include affective experiences in diverse urban settings.

Drawing on a Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) class with the community of Jisr Azzarqa, this paper examines the engagement with technology in urban planning practice. The paper argues that a CEL that utilizes advanced and situated technology, that is, Technology Oriented CEL (TOCEL), advances reciprocity in collaborations with underserved communities by developing trustworthy relationships, mutual learning, and crossing social, cultural, and geographical boundaries. The conclusion suggests that TOCEL pedagogy educates planners to work inclusively, better engage with communities, and implement decolonized practices. Moreover, it is suggested that applications of diverse technology in traditional planning processes can advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Aeromobility and air travel are known to produce multilevel experiences of sound, ultimately resulting in social and environmental struggles against noise pollution. Different studies that address aeromobile sounds and atmospheres, however, do so while using highly different concepts, approaches, tools, and methods that often create disconnects between different disciplines and their capacity for dialogue. Drawing primarily on a study of Ben Gurion International Airport, and on a nonrepresentational approach to aeromobile sounds, their experience, representation, and sensing - by people and technologies - this paper provides conceptually informed empirical accounts of different ways to get to know noise, while addressing the gaps they create between different fields of knowledge. The paper concludes that nonrepresentational thinking is a valuable pillar with which shared grounds between academic discourse, practitioners, policymakers, and the public could be progressed, offering wider considerations of noise, its constitution, outcomes, and futures in aeromobile geographies and airport planning.

Smart specialization is studied in the Arab-Jewish region of Haifa and Nazareth, with a focus on high-tech ventures created by Arab entrepreneurs. We find that not only did smart specialization occur under these complex conditions, but also it was spontaneous. It began with the sharing of entrepreneurial knowledge held by Jewish entrepreneurs through social networks set up by grassroots organizations. Policy initiatives in support of this process followed, helping to reshape the region's socioeconomic structure. Therefore, we argue that smart specialization followed a four-phase process: a pre-phase of knowledge transfer between the two communities, followed by Foray's three phases .

This article argues that high-rise residential projects—a dominant form of contemporary cities—are playing a pivotal role in generating new urban experience for city dwellers. Drawing on an affect-based research approach, we empirically examine high-rise residential projects built from 1998 to 2016 in two medium-size cities in central Israel. We address three moments of new affective experience of residents: (1) the view and the practice of viewing; (2) bodies and sound; and (3) bodies becoming a body. The article contributes a conceptual shift to urban planning for studying present-day urban experience. Accordingly, it derives insights to better understand contemporary socio-spatial relations in cities.

In light of the growing diversity in contemporary cities, planning literature calls for inclusive and participatory planning acts. Alas, little has changed in planning practice. This paper inquires into the pedagogical aspects of a case study of a qualitative research methods course aiming to prepare planners to plan with 'The Other'. Presenting five queries and the pedagogical inputs they have yielded, the conclusion suggests that inclusionary planning approaches should already be implemented in planning schools and that the relational approach and qualitative methods can provide adequate tools for widening planners' perception of 'The Other' and to integrating his/her standpoint in the planning process.

High-rise housing complexes (HRHCs) are a prominent trend in urban development. They generate new configurations of open green spaces, thus creating a new set of human-environment relations and a new constellation of urban landscapes. However, little attention has been devoted by the literature to these new spatial configurations and the urban experience they offer. Focusing on the spaces between buildings, this research article examines the urban morphology of these large urban developments and how they are being experienced by residents. Based on morphological analysis, we propose a set of outputs with which to discern and evaluate various characteristics of these new spaces. Namely, a typology of HRHCs complexes, three evaluation indexes, and a green/gray nolli map. Drawing on morphological analysis, the research discusses the role of green spaces of HRHCs in the experience of residents. We portray different tensions arising from the residents’ experience based on walking interviews and propose how these tensions are connected to the morphology of space. Juxtaposing the morphological and qualitative topological analyses, we focus on the way that different planning aspects of HRHCs’ open spaces might foster everyday use and function as well as attitudes and feelings.

This study empirically analyzes the Ben Gurion International Airport (NATBAG) expansion project, with specific reference to aircraft noise measurements. Drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT), the study traces a non-human actor—a noise level formula—that participates in the NATBAG planning process. In particular, we conduct an exploration of how a noise level formula engages different actors, concepts and entities, while also playing a pivotal role in social struggles over the airport’s operation. The paper draws on the qualitative methods of in-depth interviews and content analysis. Following the empirical examination, the paper argues for ANT to be employed as a useful toolbox to analyze present-day planning processes. The conclusion suggests that planning scholars should acknowledge the role of non-humans in shaping planning processes, the relational constitution of planning categories and vocabularies, and the processuality of planning.

This study empirically analyzes the Ben Gurion International Airport (NATBAG) expansion project, with specific reference to aircraft noise measurements. Drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT), the study traces a non-human actor—a noise level formula—that participates in the NATBAG planning process. In particular, we conduct an exploration of how a noise level formula engages different actors, concepts and entities, while also playing a pivotal role in social struggles over the airport’s operation. The paper draws on the qualitative methods of in-depth interviews and content analysis. Following the empirical examination, the paper argues for ANT to be employed as a useful toolbox to analyze present-day planning processes. The conclusion suggests that planning scholars should acknowledge the role of non-humans in shaping planning processes, the relational constitution of planning categories and vocabularies, and the processuality of planning.

Planning researchers and practitioners are adapting to new and evolving planning cultures that require new skills and techniques. This paper examines the introduction of qualitative research methods, traditionally developed as part of anthropology, sociology, and psychology disciplines, to planning students. We present an analysis of qualitative research methods' courses that were instructed to planning students. The paper portrays three principles of planning discipline that are in tension with a more constructive interpretation of the socio-spatial realities. We then offer several pedagogical inputs to qualitative methodology education for planners and how it could contribute to new and developing planning environments.

This paper deploys a relational-material approach for tracing the assembly of passengers as they move through airports and use its series of passage points. While many studies analyse airport mobility and passengers’ experiences, few do so with the question of subjectivity as their main theoretical focus. Rather than treating subjectivity as an epiphenomenon or alternatively as a myriad of spatio-sensual experiences, we treat the subjectivity of airline passengers as a product and an achievement: a work of assembly which requires the skilful coordination of body, luggage, and documents. We introduce the notion of ‘mobility capital’ as a vital ingredient in this process of active assembly: learnt variations and improvisations while interacting with the architecture of airports and with the materially embedded regulation of civil aviation account for the process of acquiring the subjectivity of airline passengers and for the variance among them.