Abstracts Submission

A fundamental provocation is reorienting urban planning in the global South: the challenge of planning in, for, and with volatile urban natures that will not be engineered into submission. Shaping the very process of urbanisation, urban natures in Southern cities refuse tired categories of informality and marginality to animatedly produce space, value, vulnerability, and political possibility. Planning must therefore engage with the incomplete, pluriversal, and associative character of contemporary ecologies, which unsettle core disciplinary assumptions.

Our thematic issue positions Southern urban natures as grammars from which new planning futures might be imagined and materialised. Planning in Southern urban natures foregrounds the ecological, where material rhythms (whether the monsoon's annual return or the gradual creep of mangrove roots) radically shape urban life and the very grounds for decision-making. Planning for Southern urban natures implores approaches that leave behind technomanagerial environmentalism, urging us to grapple with postcolonial temporalities and uneven responsibilities for care and repair. Planning with Southern urban natures pushes further still, asking how planning institutions and pedagogies might decolonise through working alongside communities and ecologies rather than seeking to render them fully legible or governable.

We invite contributions that experiment epistemologically, theoretically, methodologically, and practically with what planning becomes when urban natures are conceptualised as central actors in urban futures. This might include tackling how vernacular ecological knowledge(s) inform municipal planning practice, exploring how planning education might teach alongside urban ecologies, or analysing how Indigenous stewardship unsettles settler-colonial planning logics.

The issue welcomes studies from diverse urban geographies where socio-ecological relations are acutely visible, including (but not limited to) wetlands, intra-urban rivers and canals, coasts, peri-urban forests, and landscapes of resource extraction, and a wide range of methods, including creative, ethnographic, historical, and collaborative approaches. We especially encourage contributions that take contradictions and partial successes seriously, recognising planning as an unfinished and contentious practice, and thus to decolonise planning itself.

By advancing planning in, for, and with Southern urban natures, this thematic issue seeks to open space for more uncertain and ecologically grounded modes of planning theory, education, co-production, and professional practice.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

Nowadays, urban transformations are occurring in a context of intensifying climate change, growing socio-spatial inequality, and rapid digitisation of urban systems. Urban form—understood as the spatial configuration of networks, densities, fabrics, and built typologies—reflects critical data regarding climate exposure, social vulnerability, and the adaptive capacity of cities. However, planning instruments often remain grounded in fragmented data, segmented methods, and models that fail to adequately address spatial justice. This thematic issue proposes to explore new theoretical approaches, analytical methodologies, and emerging data sources that contribute to more informed, inclusive, and fair planning decisions. Contributions that integrate urban morphology, spatial data science, artificial intelligence, multiscale analysis, urban climate models, space syntax, digital twins, digital citizen participation, and socio-environmental vulnerability indicators are particularly welcome. This issue aims to bring together research linking urban form and climate performance (such as urban heat islands, heatwaves, and flood risk), as well as studies examining how different morphological patterns influence equity in access to green infrastructure, sustainable mobility, and urban services. Comparative approaches between the Global North and South, hybrid quantitative-qualitative methodologies, and studies aimed at transferring knowledge to public policy are highly valued. By promoting interdisciplinary dialogue among urban planning, geography, architecture, data science, and climate studies, this thematic issue aims to advance a planning paradigm grounded in robust evidence, methodological innovation, and an explicit commitment to spatial justice and the climate transition.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

In recent decades, urban planning has evolved through a turbulent series of interconnected crises. From the urban ramifications of financial crashes to war and armed conflict, pandemics, and ravaging climate change, planners are increasingly challenged to adapt well‑established practices to unpredictable, complex, and rapidly shifting urban realities. In doing so, planning appears to operate within a context increasingly defined by exception. Exceptional planning can emerge in diverse urban contexts where established norms, procedures, and institutions reach their limits in the face of unprecedented challenges, or where frames of exceptionality are mobilised to legitimise new planning trajectories. What we consider exceptional may entail the temporary suspension of formal rules, departures from entrenched philosophies and paradigms, or the postulation of novel and deviant planning practices (Harris, 2021; Virtanen, 2025).

Taking inspiration from, and going beyond, calls to examine “critical junctures” (Sorensen, 2015, 2023) and planning temporalities (Can et al., 2025), this thematic issue aims to historize exceptional planning itself. Integrating diverse literature on urban crises, planning transformation, and policy change, we seek to illuminate the historical dynamics that shape deviations from the norm—the planning exception.

We invite research examining the historical underpinnings of exceptional planning decisions, deviant practices, or sudden departures from established norms. Contributions may explore exceptional planning in post-war reconstruction, natural disasters, political transitions, environmental or health emergencies, economic collapse, or other structural shocks.

We welcome submissions on:

• historical and institutional factors shaping deviations from planning norms;

• the role of paradigms and ideologies in exceptional planning decisions;

• spatial, morphological, and material legacies of exceptional planning;

• power, contestation, and conflict in moments of exception;

• theoretical and conceptual challenges in explaining exceptional planning.

Ultimately, this thematic issue seeks to uncover lessons from past ruptures and generate insights for planning practice and urban policy in moments of current and future crises.

References:

Can, A., Rajendran, L. P., & Odeleye, N.-D. (2025). Temporal entanglements, fragmented spaces: Planning, politics, and place rhythms. Urban Planning, 10.

Harris, N. (2021). ‘The exception to the rule’: Exploring the exception and the exceptional in planning policy. Town Planning Review, 92(5), 517–536.

Sorensen, A. (2015). Taking path dependence seriously: An historical institutionalist research agenda in planning history. Planning Perspectives, 30(1), 17–38.

Sorensen, A. (2023). Taking critical junctures seriously: Theory and method for causal analysis of rapid institutional change. Planning Perspectives, 38(5), 929–947.

Virtanen, M. (2025). Making sense of exceptional planning decisions: Exploring the agonistic dynamics of sustainability in infrastructure planning. European Planning Studies, 33(10), 1735–1753.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 100 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.