This research explores energy injustices in underprivileged urban neighbourhoods through the lens of spatial capital. Based on interviews and collective mapping workshops, it analyses two case neigbourhoods in Ghent, Belgium: a modernist social housing area and a dense former working-class neighbourhood. The research identifies markers of spatial capital that influence residents' access to resources, opportunities, and barriers to participating in energy transitions. The findings show how socio-spatial inequalities amplify energy injustices, emphasizing the critical need for place-based policies to foster an equitable energy transition. By focusing on neighbourhood-scale dynamics, the research moves beyond individualised explanations to expose structural barriers to just energy transitions.

Citizen science is gaining attention for its innovative potential for research, policy-making, and address spatial aspects of sustainability transitions. However, spatial planners struggle to harness this potential beyond the extension of participatory processes. Approaches seek to recognize citizens views alongside governmental expertize in communicative processes, while citizen science is rarely conceptualized through lenses of co-production and self-organization. This paper explores the potential benefits of citizen science for spatial planning along emerging and potential interfaces. Drawing on a literature review focussed on spatial planning and citizen science, we examine existing typologies and analyse 22 citizen science cases from Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands that engage with spatial issues. The study identifies four types of interfaces between citizen science and spatial planning practices, highlighting diverse ways in which citizen science can inform or support participatory planning processes. It opens the potential for various societal actors to engage with a citizen science project, form collaborations and develop new role distributions within spatial planning.

Self-organised initiatives are increasingly recognised as an alternative to the structural deficit of participatory planning approaches, both in theory and in practice. Nevertheless, public governance is struggling to find ways to deal with such initiatives. This article identifies four prominent categories of self-organised practice, analysing the main motivation to engage in and with these practices, from the perspective of government as well as the self-organised actors. This is in turn linked to three prominent theoretical answers on how governments might deal with self-organisation. Lastly, we reflect on the complexities of a possible double connection between policymakers and self-organisations.

This paper describes the results of a research project in Antwerp, Belgium, aimed at developing a spatial analysis approach ('activity scan') assessing how the urban fabric on a neighbourhood scale can encourage physical activity and active transport. By outlining a set of recurring spatial challenges and describing the developed innovative toolkit, the research responds to the necessity for design-oriented insights on how to promote active travel and instigate concrete interventions. By critically analysing this co-creative research trajectory, this article emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary dialogue on what contributes to a movement-friendly urban environment.

This paper presents a practical and pedagogical model of socially innovative planning based on four dialectical relations between actors, institutions and planning instruments that frame, constitute and position planning actions. The paper illustrates and evaluates this model by analysing four spatial planning studios that took place during the authors' six-year long engagement in a heavily contested urban renewal project in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. The paper shows how a frame for critical inquiry helped to address changes in the studio and project realities. by understanding, experiencing and responding to the ethical and socio-environmental consequences of spatial planning practice.

A co-evolutionary approach has been gaining momentum in planning research and practice. Setting itself apart by going beyond the confines of government, starting from a level playing field, and refusing predefined outputs, it is a situational and relational approach through and through. Arguably, this strand of research has predominantly focused on forms of activism or radical planning taking place outside government-led processes, turning to the concept of self-organisation. This article, however, explores the possibility to reconnect a co-evolutionary approach to forms of contentious action occurring within or on the borderlines of the local government apparatus. In doing so, this article seeks to address an apparent gap when it comes to studying planning activism: forms of contentious actions where governmental actors collaborate with professional planning practices in challenging institutionalised methods, or commonplace procedures and instruments. Based on an analysis of two commissioned planning assignments in which the author was involved, this article aims to identify a set of reoccurring tactics mobilised to bridge social and spatial knowledge within local administrations. It does so by using four navigation techniques that can be deployed in an actor-relational approach (Hillier 2016) as an analytical framework.

This paper argues how communicative planning approaches, as one of the most dominant conceptualisations of participatory planning, often ignore the embodied dimensions of participation as a socio-political learning processes. To do so, the paper theoretically traces why a Habermasian conceptualisation of political intersubjectivity fails to democratise planning processes and turns to an alternative Mouffean framework where coproductive methods are conceptualised as public pedagogic interventions, allowing for different meanings to be created and shared in a dialogical process. Based on an analysis of two experiments the authors have conducted, some lessons are drawn on how specific methods can be designed to stimulate more embodied forms of intersubjectivity between involved actors, while avoiding top-down consensus-making. In this way, the analysis demonstrates how such methods stimulate participants to share experiences, while orienting the discussion in a spatialised direction and creating a space where the ambivalence of place is effectively stimulated.

This chapter seeks to emphasize the value of storytelling and narrative modes of thought and communication within participatory planning contexts. The chapter theoretically argues that while stories provide a means to bridge the gap between locally embedded knowledge and planning discourses and can stimulate productive debate between conflicting views, the narrative mode remains systematically undervalued within planning contexts. Based on a case study of urban renewal in Antwerp, Belgium, the chapter explores how an approach was adopted that sought to operationalize co-productive storytelling as a means for local actors to engage with the redevelopment process. It illustrates, based on the most central storylines, how this approach has the potential to combine socio-spatial research and deliberation, while connecting daily realities to future-oriented visions. In doing so the chapter aims to emphasize the importance of embedding narrative modes of reasoning within a co-productive approach, to provide a platform for local knowledge to engage with urban planning discourses, and to empower local inhabitants to make sense of spatial transformation processes.

Participatory design and planning processes are subject to co-option by neoliberal forces and post-political logics. This places participatory practitioners, such as co-designers or planners involved in co-production in a difficult position, whereby not taking a critical stance can lead to legitimising and normalising the dominant logic of the state or elite. However, taking a clear critical stance can result in a loss of access and trust from stakeholders and ultimately result in being side-lined from influential design or planning processes. This article critically adapts Eric M. Eisenberg's theory of strategic ambiguity for the post-political context as a potential discursive resource for practitioners seeking to remain active within influential urban decision-making processes while sustaining a critical position and practice. It opens a discussion with the participatory practitioners ndvr on their use of ambiguity and how it negotiates a balance between access, trust and criticality.

All the more in the theoretical debate as well as in planning practice we see a plea for an increased citizeninvolvement in planning processes (Albrechts, 2008, 2002; Van Herzele, 2004). Civic engagement in planning practice is seen as a powerful formula to head towards a “deeper concept of democratic values”: bringing politics closer to the people and transforming planning approaches and institutions in such a way that it will lead to the creation of more sustainable and qualitative urban spaces as well as to an enhanced quality of urban political life (Booher, 2008, p. 383). An introduction of “creativity from below” or the “wisdom of crowds” is seen as a vital key to begin to understand the full complexity of stakeholders, opinions and intertwined webs of relations relevant to spatial planning (Albrechts, 2008, p. 412).

Entrepreneurial strategies to urban development involve a combination of risk-taking, inventiveness, promotion, and profit motivation, mostly associated with the field of economics. This market rational, guided by public-private investments and city branding, could however result in (a) a collection of sanitized city spaces specifically designed for the upper classes with unfavourable activities pushed outward, and (b) a homogenization of different destinations, without sufficient attention for the space-specific characteristics. Specific entrepreneurial strategies and their consequences for socially marginalized groups and destination competitiveness are discussed in the case of the red-light district of Amsterdam.