Exceptional Urban Planning: Crises, Legacies, and the Weight of History

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).

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