How are young planning academics responding in their research to the grand economic, societal and environmental challenges posed by globalization, megacities, resource scarcity, rapid shifts in technology, increasing urbanization and climate change? At the same time, how is the planning discipline responding to the rapid transformation of cities and urban regions in contexts where spatial scales are increasingly blurred and sectoral planning has in some places largely supplanted national planning systems?
Some of the answers emerge in the seven articles contained in this special theme edition of Planning Practice and Research. They comprise a storyline suggesting that urban and regional planning is under constant change, increasingly grasping innovative tools, technologies and stakeholder engagement, all of which push into new disciplinary areas while providing alternative insights into the inherent complexity of planning issues. If nothing else, this selection of articles serves to illustrate the need for researchers, educators and practising planners to cross-fertilize each other's domains of expertise. This will help to counter disciplinary tunnel vision and keep planning relevant in age where many of the new ideas and visions are emerging from non-traditional planning areas such as behavioral economics, ICT, biology, physics and media studies.
While it is widely acknowledged that early career researchers are the Stakhanovites of the modern academic paper factory, there are precious few arenas that are dedicated to publishing their original work. We are therefore grateful to Planning Practice and Research for opening up to AESOP Young Academics (YA) and hope that such an endeavour can become a regular feature of a number of planning journals. This AESOP YA special edition attempts to shed light on some of the grand challenges by highlighting the efforts and perceptions of some emerging planning academics on substantial and procedural aspects of planning, including the evolution of legal and regulatory frameworks, innovative methods of planning engagement, and recent shifts in spatial planning policies and practices.
Legal and Regulatory Frameworks
Downes and Storch describe the case of Ho Chi Minh City as planners address the complexities of managing rapid urbanization and economic development in the context of ensuring the long-term safety and security of the mega-city region in light of current and future climatic changes. The conflicts inherent within such a dynamic, such as the multiple spatial scales and diffuse responsibility for sector-specific planning silos, are not unique to Vietnam and can be found in cities and regions throughout the world.
New Methods of Planning Engagement
Garau's article on augmented reality (AR) in the field of cultural heritage demonstrates both the possibilities and challenges of merging the digital, physical, mobile, cultural and historic layers of a neighborhood of Cagliari, Italy to develop new modes of cultural tourism. There is an inversion taking place that turns the old tourist model on its head, whereby the physical collections of a city's cultural patrimony need no longer to reside only inside of a physical building, but instead are made available throughout the city for tourists and citizens alike to discover through their smart phones or tablets. Nevertheless, the possibilities of AR pose challenges for the existing institutions and structures of cultural protection, heritage and tourism that require alterations in order to realize the full potential of AR.
Another aspect of cultural and historical preservation relates to that which Neal dissects is the use of 3D modeling and visualization tools combined with existing techniques of geologic and geographic maps to point toward new ways of identifying and preserving archeologically rich sites within existing and planned urban spaces. Neal's article also opens up an interesting discussion about the spatial and temporal dimensions of planning today, extending the vertical dimension of spatial and urban planning deeply into the substrate of the past, present and future city. Moreover, there is a need for planners to be able to access such data when making long-term strategies. To date there are few places in Europe that have an integrated vision and method for how to identify and preserve historically or culturally significant archeological sites in the face of significant cost and time pressures that accompany large underground infrastructure investments.
From the perspective of innovative ways of public involvement in planning, Sagaris tells us an exciting story about the evolution of a citizen-led planning institution in Santiago de Chile via the use of ethnographic tools and participatory action research in planning. Her article discusses how local citizens’ opposition to a contentious urban highway project evolved from a simple anti-highway revolt to a highly orchestrated citizen movement, and how it contributed to mobilize shifts in governance that significantly influenced the potential for change in planning under adverse conditions.
Shifts in Planning and Land-Use Systems, Policies and Practices
Cremer-Schulte's analysis of territorial re-scaling in Grenoble, France, exposes a number of tensions between formal structures of top-down spatial planning and the realities of the city-region as the driver for new forms of strategic planning. In particular, the conflicts between urban and rural visions for the metropolitan conurbation are unlikely to be settled fairly, bound up as they are with inter-municipal competition for workplace and residential development and the imbalanced power relationship between the urbanized centre and the periphery. In a sense, this case is a classical example of the kinds of spatial shifts occurring within Europe and beyond as the redistributive functions of spatial planning that dominated in the 1960s and 1970s have been abandoned in favor of picking ‘winners and losers’ in the global contest for growth and investment.
In their exploration of metropolitan planning in Cork, Ireland, Brady et al. show how local and regional landscapes, particularly the extant greenbelt, has had a remarkable impact on the sustainable development patterns of the city region. Moreover, the authors found indications of a convergence of economic development, environmental sustainability, local governments and landscape toward a positive feedback loop that has yielded a regional development pattern based upon compact city principles and open space preservation.
Finally, in the increasingly relevant context of planning for climate change, Driscoll examines the role of path dependencies in conditioning future low-carbon transport options. Through his analysis of two metropolitan cases, he shows how path dependencies and increasing returns tend to reinforce existing carbon-intensive transport modes despite aggressive greenhouse gas reduction strategies. In this light, he stresses the need to expand the planning toolkit associated with path-dependent systems toward more solid decision-support tools that may offer a means to break the current tendency toward further carbon lock-in.
The articles here were selected after a wide call from a larger number of abstracts. The authors were asked to keep the contributions short so as to be able to include as many articles as possible, so the articles are somewhat shorter than normal, but they all give indications of further sources on the topics. We hope that some of those who were not selected this time are able to contribute to future special editions in this or other articles to help demonstrate the breadth and depth of research underway by young planners. The authors would like to thank the many reviewers who provided full and considerate reviews, taking into account that the authors being young academics do not have extensive publication experience.