Inequalities in Urban Future-Making

While questions of urban inequality have long constituted a topic of inquiry for the social sciences, the picture is more ambiguous when it comes to the applied spatial sciences and policy-making concerned with urban development. Questions of access to housing, social services, and infrastructure are certainly of key concern in disciplines such as architecture and planning, both in research as well as in practice. The same is true for new forms of environmental inequalities: As the effects of climate change, such as droughts, heat waves, and flooding, are increasingly felt in cities around the world, it has also become clear that the effects on cities are unequally distributed, particularly affecting urban populations that are the most vulnerable and least affluent.

Many cities take measures to tackle these interrelated ecological and social challenges when adapting urban spaces to new realities, reducing the impact of environmental hazards and extreme weather events, and implementing future-oriented strategies. Yet, whether and how forms of inequality are considered, reflected on, and actively approached in such measures and strategies of urban future-making remains open to discussion.

Contributions to this thematic issue should examine, from different angles, the capacity of social actors and institutions in urban development to address current dynamics of urban inequality. In particular, we urge authors to deal with the question of how policy instruments, planning strategies, and urban design solutions consider implicit or explicit challenges of inequality. The focus should be on professionals in built environment disciplines as social actors in various roles in the state administration, private sector, non-profit sector, and civil society initiatives, as well as on institutions in related fields of action in urban development policy and planning.

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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