Planning in, for, and with Southern Urban Natures

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.