Planning Theory

Housing informality in the Global North is becoming an increasingly important topic amongst planners. In this paper, we build on recent debates on informality and planning to highlight forms of housing informality that emerge at the intersection of affordability crises, and capitalism’s new extractivist frontiers through digital platforms. Using the lens of conversions, we show how the flexible transformation of building uses, from commercial to residential (and vice versa) by landlords create new and emerging forms of informality and subsequent planning challenges. These conversions present three specific characteristics: platform-led rapidity, regulatory grey areas, and professional intermediation. These are being extended through corporate and institutional alignments with for-profit motives of rent extraction, and by rapid real estate investment dynamics. Such conversions do not involve material of physical alterations to the built form and thus remain invisible. They exist flexibly in the grey areas of the law, and as a consequence, the rights of tenants, users and those of the wider community become weaker. We focus on examples of property guardianship and digital platforms-enabled home-sharing in England to illustrate our argument, and propose emphasising conversions as dynamic processes to draw attention to their implications for planning theory and practice.

Spatial planning is inherently oriented towards the future. However, the future cannot be explained, but can only be anticipated through understanding. Therefore, understanding is identified as the central epistemic orientation in planning practice, which enables planners to anticipate the future in the first place. The article aims to (1) distinguish between explaining and understanding, (2) give an outlook on why the often cited gap between theory and practice can be traced back to these two basic epistemic orientations and (3) develop new concepts that enable understanding processes in planning practice to be studied from a research perspective.

In the reality of planning practice, where there is usually no a priori ‘right’ substantive conception of justice to guide and evaluate decision making, conceptions are negotiated between stakeholders. Moreover, these conceptions vary in space and time. The existing academic discussion on justice in planning provides limited insight in and guidance for how to navigate the plurality of conceivable and valid substantive conceptions of justice that may be articulated and applied. To address this gap, we introduce a dynamic justice framework, which looks at how the different elements of justice (‘materials of justice’) are being articulated, connected, and changed in discourses and institutions. We believe this dynamic justice framework helps to make explicit the conceptions of justice in planning practice and the processes that shape them.

Technical and digital knowledge creation frequently homogenizes and marginalizes specific groups of people, thereby perpetuating oppressive power structures and utilizing technologies as instruments for top-down uneven urban development. The increased reliance on the flow of data facilitated by digital technologies has often reproduced existing inequalities through invisibility, oversimplification, or incomplete data sets. In contexts of urban informality, invisibility is particularly pervasive in self-built communities that are deemed illegible to and by the state and are subjected to neglect and removals, reinforcing historical patterns of oppression, exclusion, and racism in residents’ everyday lives. Similarly, insurgent planning illuminates grassroots efforts challenging systems and structures of oppression to spur change and collective urban rights. In the last few decades, the appropriation of digital tools and resources has allowed communities and movements to redefine their organizing means with digital tools and platforms, producing, expanding, and documenting urban insurgencies. This article puts forward a Digital Insurgency conceptual framework to highlight insurgent processes of knowledge production, organizing, and appropriation of digital and technological means that challenge hegemonic systems of oppression while advocating for collective urban rights. Case studies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Fortaleza, Brazil, are analyzed through the proposed framework, considering movements’ political foundation, agency, practical implementations, utilization of digital and technological tools, and the crafting of counter-hegemonic narratives. The selected cases demonstrate the robust potential of Digital Insurgency in supporting the struggles for urban collective rights and social and spatial justice through grassroots digitalization of urban insurgency.

An Australian reimagining of the Aesop fable of the fox, the flies and the hedgehog introduces critical exploration of spatial planning-related imaginaries whereby practices of settler colonialism and urban expansion have caused disruption and destruction of hundreds of thousands of human and other-than-human lives. The argument is grounded in Serres’ concept of the parasite, questioning what type of parasitic relationship spatial planning has with its more-than-human context. Resetting the coordinates of planning practice through a relational transversal approach is proposed. Transversality is a vehicle of rupture and convergence constituted through events and alliances as temporary resting places in which the agential capacities of humans and other-than-humans are temporarily suspended, so that their relations can be reassembled in a form of inclusive disjunctive synthesis, sensitive to the place and issues involved.