Coral Reefs, Fresh Streams and Deep Oceans in The Future of Planning Research: Introducing Planext in The Framework of Aesop Policies and Strategies

I am happy to introduce the first volume of plaNext as one of the most challenging initiatives of our association. What is plaNext? plaNext is an open access online journal intellectually produced and managed by AESOP Young Academics. plaNext is published as part of the AESOP online publishing platform, InPlanning. It is an international peer- reviewed journal. It arises from the collective work of our community. And so, plaNext is many things at the same time.

Retrofitting, repurposing and re-placing: A multi-media exploration of occupation in Cape Town, South Africa

The vast majority of city planning literature on informal occupations has focused on how residents occupy vacant and peripheral land, developing informal structures to address their basic needs. A smaller body of work, but one with much purchase in South Africa, explores the informal occupation of existing formal structures and how residents infuse these emergent places with social and political meaning. Across this work, occupations represent a dominant mode of city-building in the Global South. Contributing to this debate on city-making and occupations, this paper departs from an unusual case of South African occupation. We explore how displaced people have occupied a multi-storey vacant hospital building situated close to Cape Town’s city centre. Using documentary photography and interviews with residents, we argue that this occupation reflects a logic of ‘retrofit city-making’. We show that, through processes of repairing, repurposing, and renovating, dwellers have retrofit an institutional building, previously designed by the state for a very different use, to meet their needs and desires. As cities become more densely built and vacant land more peripheral or scarce, the retrofit of underutilised buildings, particularly through bottom-up actions such as occupation, will become an increasingly important mode of urban development. Not only are the practices of material transformation useful to understand, so too are the ways in which occupations reflect significantly more than simply survivalist strategies, but also care and meaning-making.

Generative pedagogies from and for the social production of habitat: Learning from HIC-AL School of grassroots urbanism

Re-thinking dominant epistemological assumptions of the urban in the global South implies recognising the role of grassroots networks in challenging epistemic injustices through the co-production of multiple saberes and haceres for more just and inclusive cities. This paper examines the pedagogies of such networks by focusing on the experiences nurtured within Habitat International Coalition in Latin America (HIC-AL), identified as a ‘School of Grassroots Urbanism’ (Escuela de Urbanismo Popular). Although HIC-AL follows foremost activist rather than educational objectives, members of HIC-AL identify and value their practices as a ‘School’, whose diverse pedagogic logics and epistemological arguments are examined in this paper. The analysis builds upon a series of in-depth interviews, document reviews and participant observation with HIC-AL member organisations and allied grassroots networks. The discussion explores how the values and principles emanating from a long history of popular education and popular urbanism in the region are articulated through situated pedagogies of resistance and transformation, which in turn enable generative learning from and for the social production of habitat.

Housing systems in the Global South: The relevance of the ‘social housing’ approach in meeting housing needs

This paper addresses the problem of accessing decent and affordable housing in the Global South, where the housing need is, in general, more problematic than in the Global North. The paper first identifies five distinctive characteristics of housing systems in the Global South as compared to those in the Global North. These include: (a) the diverse facets of global financialization; (b) the role of the developmentalist state; (c) the importance of informality; (d) the decisive role of the family; and (e) the rudimentary welfare systems. Given these features, the paper reflects on the concept and practices of social housing, particularly their appropriateness to deal with the housing problem in the Global South. The paper then addresses the question of whether the social housing approach is relevant for solving the contemporary housing needs in the Global South. It argues that social housing, redefined to better encompass the distinctive characteristics of housing systems in the Global South, is indeed a useful policy approach and can play a decisive role in satisfying unmet housing needs. Such an approach needs to take into account the great role of informality and family support systems and develop appropriate funding instruments and modes of institutionalization protecting housing rights and the quality of life.

Legacies of mistrust: Why colonial imprints on the implementation of fiscal reforms in Mozambique and Mexico matter

National authorities across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have implemented various forms of fiscal decentralization over the past three decades with equivocal results. The design of such reforms has long rested on theories based on the experiences of high-income countries’ efforts at increasing local autonomy, accountability, and basic service efficiencies. Critics of the global advocacy for fiscal decentralization, however, point to several challenges with its implementation across diverse political economies that differ significantly from those in high-income environments. Nonetheless, these critiques often obscure the impact that colonial regimes and their legacies have on current efforts to fiscally decentralize. In two post-colonial environments where fiscal decentralization projects have unrolled, namely Mozambique and Mexico, we show how colonial imprints remain critical to understanding efforts at fiscal decentralization. Our focus in these cases is on how race-based caste systems introduced under colonial administrations fed the development and evolution of dual governance systems across spaces and peoples that bred mistrust between residents, local authorities and central authorities. We argue that the conflicting rationales in evidence between stakeholders involved in fiscal decentralization projects today are rooted in the social mistrust and power struggles born from these colonial experiences. In conclusion, we contend that fiscal decentralization reforms must explicitly grapple with these spatialized and racialized legacies of mistrust and the diverse rationalities guiding stakeholders in both the design and evaluation of public policies meant to strengthen local autonomy, transparency, and efficiencies.

Infrastructural insurgency: Constructing situated data at Brazil’s urban periphery

This paper focuses on how insurgencies are continually recast in parallel to State-led redevelopment or ‘upgrading’. It brings attention to communities that shape and are reshaped by inclusion of data in processes through which citizens participate in city-making. Drawing on a comparative case study of intensively upgraded informal settlements in São Paulo, Brazil, findings show that data-based insurgencies have been forged from prior collective action. The resultant co-created or situated data challenge the State’s legitimacy as sole arbiter of informal settlement representation and infrastructure transformation in cities. In this context, the term infrastructural insurgency is proposed as a way that socio-material agencies iterate over time and in space, and to stimulate discourse about the future of upgrading. It reflects on which interactions between data and redevelopment can inform planning in post-redevelopment conditions across global south.

Citizen’s motivation in neighbourhood planning in North West England

Although some researchers have addressed the question of what motivates citizens to become involved in lower tier planning in the UK, the phenomenon is not yet fully understood. A lack of hard data, combined with some mutually contradictory arguments in the field, makes for imperfect analysis, and this can potentially undermine the effectiveness of individual engagement in Neighbourhood Plans (NPs). This paper focuses on what motivates citizens to participate in the process of creating NPs in North West England, and explores past theories on individual motivation. This study achieved its research aims through extensive research of the relevant literature, combined with an empirical study of five neighbourhoods in North West England. The main conclusion drawn from the dissertation is that there are complex and multiple motivations of people participating in NPs, and these impetuses are affected by a range of political, environmental and socio-economic factors. This research offers opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of NPs for researchers and NP stakeholders alike.

Gentrifying the Brazilian city? Convergences and divergences in urban studies

There is a growing number of processes in Brazilian cities that have been identified as gentrification. However, the classic definition of gentrification as a process of transformation of existing urban housing stocks by new homeowners with a higher socio-economic profile poses challenges to understand recent empirical data coming from Brazil and the Global South more generally. Instead of dismissing them as deviant cases, this paper challenges the Northern empirical foundations of gentrification theory and calls for a new methodological approach to both classic and new cases that take into consideration its contextualization. This new framework for gentrification research is based on necessary dimensions that identify the production of gentrifiable space as the initial condition to the process of socioeconomic change with displacement in which built-environment upgrades constitute one of its most visible feature. These dimensions are present in each and every case, bounding the concept and operationalizing research, while local mediating forces make gentrification context-specific. Therefore, urban studies on gentrification. Should understand and explore the nature of these differences, in a return to in-depth studies and empirical research, opening spaces for de-centering positions and building theory from multiple positionalities.

A Lacanian understanding of the southern planning theorists’ identification under the hegemony of western philosophy

As a planning theorist who has studied and taught planning theory in the Global South and North, I grapple with the question – “What does planning theory mean in the Global South?” To answer this question, I ontologically investigate the meaning of Southern planning theory based on a Lacanian approach. Drawing on the Lacanian theory of human subjectivity, this article explains how planning theorists’ identities are constituted through their interactions within academia. Lacanian discourse theory assists in exploring how most Southern planning theorists adopt, internalise, and use hegemonic Western philosophy, ideas, and discourses as the only accepted mechanism of truth. Consequently, this process profoundly alienates Southern planning theorists from their local context, as they often devalue, overlook, and neglect non-Western beliefs, ideas, knowledge, and philosophy. I argue that although the number of Southern planning theorists has increased during the last decades, non-Western philosophy is seldom utilised as the core of their critical studies. Based on the Lacanian discourse theory, I show that they mostly remain in the hegemonic mechanism of knowledge production that is embedded in the colonial era.

Inclusion in urban environmental governance of small and intermediary cities of the global South

Urban sustainability is governed beyond the urban scale through trans-local networks and assemblages of actors and institutions. There is an emerging field of interest that aims to understand the outcomes of urban sustainability interventions, both from the environmental and social equity perspectives. This paper contributes to the literature on governing urban environmental sustainability transitions, with a distinct focus on small and intermediary cities of the global South. Actors in cities of the global South are adopting a variety of ways towards achieving urban sustainability transitions in the realm of disaster risk reduction, adaptation building, greenhouse gas emission reduction, and natural resource management. Our paper employs an analytical framework derived from Bai et. al. (2010) to chart the actors, drivers, finances, barriers, and the inclusivity and sustainability outcomes in seven interventions led by different actors. Five of the cases are drawn extensively from literature, while two case studies reflect on our primary engagement in the cities of Nakuru in Kenya and Udon Thani in Thailand. We find that the actors leading and financing the projects and the drivers of the intervention can explain differential outcomes in the inclusion processes and the framing of environmental solutions. We then delineate the opportunities and barriers to achieve multi-level governance approaches that are relevant to planning transformations in the South.