Today's housing crisis is, in part, a failure of imagination: a loss of the vocabulary through which community-led, informal, and incremental housing was once possible. This paper takes the conference theme seriously enough to contest it. Building planning up implies strengthening existing foundations — but what if those foundations are themselves part of the problem? What if the intellectual architecture of contemporary planning was constructed, in part, through the systematic exclusion of alternative ways of thinking about housing, community, and land?

The plotlands of England and Wales offer one of the clearest instances of this process. From the late nineteenth century, working-class families excluded from the formal housing market housed themselves — building dwellings from salvaged materials and collective ingenuity on cheap plots of marginal land. These communities embodied a relationship to place that was durational and relational rather than delivered: condition-making rather than placemaking, in the sense that communities created the circumstances for their own dwelling rather than receiving housing as a managed product. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act rendered them illegitimate. What survives does so as anomaly — institutionally uncategorisable, absent from policy frameworks — yet holding knowledge that has never stopped mattering.

This paper argues that the plotlands are a diagnostic site where planning's imaginative foreclosure is most visible and recoverable. The contemporary marginalisation of community-led housing — co-housing, community land trusts, incremental self-build — is not a series of independent policy failures. It is the continuing expression of a path dependency running directly from their un-naming. If that genealogy is correct, it carries a radical but logically coherent policy implication: that community-led, self-organised, and trust-based approaches to housing should be the legal first stage of any development process — the threshold that volume housebuilding must demonstrate it cannot meet before its path-dependent procedures are permitted to follow. Recovery requires not building planning up on its current foundations, but inverting the assumption that delivered housing is the default and community-made housing the marginal exception.

The paper draws on a new interdisciplinary research programme currently testing these arguments across surviving plotlands sites through co-present, multi-perspectival encounter — designed to reach the knowledge these communities hold on something closer to its own terms.

Planning and mental health implications of modular homes

An interdisciplinary study of modular homes and the vulnerable people that live in them, funded with the assistance of a Practitioner Research Fund grant from the RTPI. These homes frequently do not meet the UK’s ‘Nationally Described Space Standard’ (2015), or the Republic of Ireland’s ‘Design Standards for New Apartments’ (2018), in which the minimum is 37 square metres of floor space per dwelling, the smallest permissible studio apartment for a single person.

Some modules are built from timber frames or insulated panels, while others are converted from shipping containers. External dimensions are constrained by the need to move these units by road and deploy each module by crane. Local authorities and charities have implemented housing schemes based on these prefabricated structures, intended to tackle homelessness more quickly and at a lower cost than conventional construction.

While people living in caravans have been the subject of planning case law for many decades, ‘tiny’ or modular homes have been presented as a new housing solution despite being functionally similar to caravans lived in by gypsies and travellers, or tourist caravans used year-round by permanent residents.

Any discrepancy between attitudes to ‘tiny homes’ and caravans creates uncertainty for planning and housing officers regarding accommodation for some of the most disadvantaged people in society. While anyone can become homeless, this risk is greatly increased for marginalised groups, and so spatial standards for accommodation can be considered an equalities issue.

Densification is increasingly seen as a way to address the persistent housing shortage in metropolitan areas while promoting sustainable forms of development that prevent urban sprawl. Suburban areas have largely been neglected in debates about this, yet in many respects are ripe for densification provided advocates find ways and means of fitting new development into small, constrained sites in existing neighbourhoods.

Established suburbs in England often have active civic societies comprising of local community members. Many of these voluntary societies take an interest in urban planning, mobilising local knowledge about their neighbourhood and built environment to comment and advise local authority planners as acritical friend, so are well placed to advise on how suburban densification can fit into their neighbourhood. But it is presently unclear how civic societies view this densification; is this something they support or oppose? What aspects are acceptable and which are not?

Drawing on 16 interviews with civic societies in suburban neighbourhoods and towns from across England conducted during 2025, we find a highly variegated appetite for suburban densification which is largely dependent on the relative qualities of what is proposed and its location. Crucially, civic societies seek to improve their neighbourhoods by enhancing the quality of development rather than oppose all development outright. However, government pressure to increase house building can lead to civic societies finding themselves at odds with planners and being unfairly labelled as NIMBYs, thereby fuelling fears of alienation amongst community groups in local decision making.

With the Government’s target of 1.5 million new houses over the current Parliament and the
policy of ‘grey belt’, there are wide-ranging and profound questions being asked and discussed
about the future of the Green Belt as it comes under unprecedented development pressure.
However, with the revival of strategic planning there are distinctive opportunities to rethink the
purpose and function of the policy, especially surrounding having a 'multi-functional' purpose.

With the publication of a Monograph recently on the Green Belt (Goode, 2025), this paper aims to, firstly, to examine past attempts at Green Belt reform through the lens of historical institutionalism. It then uses this to explore the possible trajectories and ramifications of the Government’s ‘grey belt’ reforms at a time of unprecedented development pressure on Green Belt. Secondly, it conceptualises alternative futures for the policy including the possibility of a more environmentally based policy whilst strategically being reviewed to meet housing need.

Interlocking climate and nature crises demand urgent departures from dominant pro-growth development trajectories, exposing the limits of three decades of weak sustainability-oriented planning. Yet while previous research highlights land-use conflicts and planning exceptions as moments of challenge, we lack an adequate account of how and under what conditions change occurs, and whether it endures. To address this gap, we apply Boltanski and Thévenot’s neo-pragmatist ‘orders of worth’ framework to examine how planning exceptions arising from contested situations - where the fit between rules and cases is disputed - contribute to remaking the social order.

This argument is developed by analysing the Welsh Government’s 2019 decision to refuse consent for a major, 22km, M4 motorway extension project and its legacy, drawing on policy documents, media reports, and stakeholder interviews, collected from the period 2013-2026. Our analysis shows how ecological justifications became elevated in relation to market and industrial orders of worth, disrupting the institutionalised transport planning logic centred on economic growth and predict-and-provide. Furthermore, the refusal decision produced a significant rupture in Welsh transport planning, in which the ecological critiques of the previous development trajectory have ‘risen to generality’ (after Boltanski). This change in direction has been institutionalised in new appraisal tests for road projects and shifting transport investment priorities. The article demonstrates the importance of exceptional environment-driven project refusals in creating conditions that facilitate the birth of new norms. It also points to the roles that planning can play in shaping legacy effects, notably by ‘locking in’ a changed reality.

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) have become an increasingly prominent and contested feature of transport and planning policy within the United Kingdom. Existing research has largely focused on their impacts on traffic reduction, air quality, active travel and public health outcomes, whilst comparatively limited attention has been paid to questions of personal safety and perceptions of safety within transformed street environments.

This paper expands upon a limited but emerging body of research assessing the relationship between LTN interventions, street crime and perceived safety. Whilst existing studies suggest LTNs may contribute towards reductions in crime, calmer streets and improved neighbourhood conditions, research remains limited, particularly outside of London. Any evidence demonstrating improvements in safety associated with LTNs provides further support for what remains a frequently controversial planning intervention.

Using Birmingham as a case study, the research combines quantitative analysis of police-recorded violent and sexual offences over time with qualitative investigation through surveys, interviews and participatory mapping exercises involving local residents and workers. The study examines how perceptions of safety are influenced by changes in traffic permeability, street activity, visibility and informal surveillance following LTN implementation. Particular attention is given to women’s experiences of public space and how this can change within LTN environments.

Planning is increasingly called upon to address health inequalities, yet the analytical tools used to measure accessibility are often under‑examined. This paper focuses on the methodology used to construct walking isochrones for people aged over 65 in Northern Ireland, demonstrating how methodological choices fundamentally shape understandings of access to community pharmacies.

Drawing on doctoral research, the paper critically interrogates the widespread application of the “20‑minute rule” as a benchmark for accessibility. Despite its prominence in planning discourse, the rule is rarely defined or empirically grounded, particularly in relation to older populations. This research develops a walking isochrone methodology that incorporates age-sensitive assumptions, including adjusted walking speeds, network-based routing, and the influence of terrain. These refinements enable a more realistic representation of how older adults navigate the built environment.

The findings illustrate how standard approaches, often based on simplified speeds and uniform thresholds, risk overstating accessibility, particularly when applied uncritically to walking. Small methodological variations produce markedly different isochrone outputs, reshaping the geography of perceived access and revealing spatial inequalities that are otherwise concealed.

The paper argues that isochrones are not neutral technical tools but constructed measures that embed assumptions about mobility, capability, and space. By making these assumptions explicit, the research contributes to methodological innovation within planning and calls for more reflexive, context-sensitive applications of accessibility metrics. In doing so, it aligns with the conference theme by demonstrating how strengthening methodological foundations can enhance planning’s capacity to identify and address inequality in ageing populations.

Green infrastructure (GI) sits at the intersection of planning theory and practice, offering nature-based solutions to pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges. Yet GI lacks a coherent epistemic base. Key claims cannot be justified in consistent ways or evaluated using shared standards. This paper traces the evolution of GI knowledge across its first 30 years (1995–2025), drawing on a Scopus dataset of 10,573 publications. Using longitudinal bibliometric analysis alongside a Sociology of Knowledge framework and boundary work theory, we examine how GI knowledge is socially constructed, how power and influence are distributed among competing epistemic communities, and what this means for planning's capacity to mobilise GI in policy and practice. Our findings reveal three main disciplinary clusters contributing to GI framings — Ecological, Urban, and Hydrological. Each is diverging rather than converging. GI thinking began as a field with interdisciplinary promise but increasingly is exhibiting growing multidisciplinarity: joint puzzle-solving is giving way to parallel problem-solving. As disciplines work together in different ways, so hierarchies come into play. Ecologically-oriented researchers hold structural primacy. Urban and Hydrological researchers are epistemically distant. Boundary organisations play a crucial but underexplored role in synthesising knowledge across these divides and translating it into actionable planning frameworks.These developments raise concern that GI risks becoming a panacea concept, vulnerable to political co-option and resistant to the kind of coherent, evidence-based planning that long-term, place-based approaches demand. We conclude with a research agenda calling for a more clearly demarcated GI ontology to strengthen planning's intellectual and practical foundations.

This contribution uses Animal Rescue Centres (ARCs) as an unconventional but revealing lens through which to examine how planning theory, methods, and disciplinary identity are evolving. ARCs sit at the margins of planning: essential infrastructures of multispecies care, yet largely absent from policy frameworks, sustainability agendas, and academic debate. Their marginality exposes deeper tensions in how planning defines “development,” allocates legitimacy, and imagines its publics.

Drawing on ongoing doctoral research that combines spatial analysis, site assessments, planning case studies, and qualitative engagement with ARC operators, this contribution reflects on what ARCs reveal about planning’s conceptual blind spots. Their experiences of regulatory invisibility, land-use precarity, and inconsistent decision-making highlight how planning practice continues to privilege human-centric, service-oriented infrastructures while overlooking forms of care, labour, and environmental value that fall outside established categories.

The discussion considers how multispecies perspectives, welfare‑oriented infrastructures, and informal sustainability practices challenge planning’s methodological assumptions and open new avenues for research–practice dialogue. It asks what planning becomes when its objects of concern expand beyond human needs, and how such expansion might reshape long‑term spatial futures, policy design, and public understandings of what planning is for.

By foregrounding ARCs, the contribution invites a broader conversation about how planning can build itself up, conceptually, ethically, and methodologically, to engage with emerging forms of urban and rural care that currently sit beyond its field of vision.

Pavement parking has emerged as a critical site of contestation, representing a growing dilemma in the design of places, amidst a challenging socio-political context. While a recent policy shift in England empowers councils to address the issue, effective responses remain constrained by a lack of data, evidence, and tools.

Framed within broader scholarship on mobility justice, this research investigates pavement parking within the South Yorkshire Combined Authority (SYMCA) geography, covering the four constituent Local Authority areas. The research team, led by CRESR, are analysing the issue across diverse urban contexts—ranging from short-term obstruction near schools and high streets to persistent, long-term parking in residential areas.

Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research combines structured pavement audits using a bespoke audit methodology, qualitative research on the lived experiences of residents, interviews with Local Authority officers, and GIS mapping. This allows us to draw insights into the spatial nature of obstructive parking and its impact at a time of increased interest in policy and planning responses.

A primary output will be a light-touch, scalable pavement parking audit methodology/tool. By identifying how environmental constraints—such as housing stock and trip generators—relate to obstruction, the tool will better enable evidence-informed responses. For example, influencing local planning policy, design standards, and decision-making within the planning and built environment professions more broadly.

This shifts the focus beyond enforcement towards more strategic planning, design and placemaking to foster accessible, inclusive design, and ensure that the needs of pedestrians are prioritised in shaping existing and future places.

There is an inherent contradiction in regional planning: “never before has the necessity for effective regional governance and planning been so great” (Soja 2015, p. 379) and yet there are those who argue “regional planning as we know it is now defunct and something we need to get used to” (Harrison et al 2021, p. 6).

Throughout the twentieth century, planning and planners were central to our understanding of cities and regions. Today, however, planning is facing powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually, practically – in ways arguably not seen before. Recent developments and trends are raising fundamental questions about how we plan regions. Planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but has been opened up to a diverse group of actors, each with their own interests. The study of cities and regions was traditionally taught in planning schools and geography departments, but this link with place and space disciplines is being steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in and through interdisciplinary research institutes.

Against this backdrop, Regions in Evolution provides the first comprehensive account of a hitherto untold history of regions and planning. Told through the unique lens of regional studies, we bring to light the role of key individuals, groups and disciplines in shaping research agendas and debate. It reveals voices which were marginalised, planning ideas which were lost, approaches that keep coming back and challenges that persist. Believing passionately in the values and purpose of regional planning, while sceptical of the one-size-fits-all institutional form that Regional Planning often adopts, we develop an argument for planning regional futures based on a multitude of approaches, methods and strategies that might still require someone to make sense of it all – the planner.

This paper reflects on the current prospects for planning history research, as well as the author's recent activity regarding archives of key planning institutions, past and present. This has included attempting to make accessible, find homes for, and promote interest in archives of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the Housing Centre Trust and the Building Research Establishment.
The paper reflects on recent publications and discussions of other key stakeholders, including on the work of Gordon Cherry, author of the only history of the RTPI. The recent 40th anniversary special issue of Planning Perspectives (41:1), the first solely planning history focussed academic journal, makes for a timely anchor.
The paper shares particular challenges facing planning history, as well as areas of opportunity. Challenges identified include the further prioritisation of funding to research which is likely to impact on societal challenges. Opportunities include the contemporary interest in archives, documentation and objectivity within concerns around post-truth politics and the widespread concern about 'misinformation'.
The paper concludes by sharing ambitions and initiatives for cross-sector linkage around the history of the built environment.

This paper provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of cross-border strategic spatial planning on the island of Ireland, examining the evolution of planning systems, the effectiveness of existing governance arrangements, and the implications of emerging policy divergence. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach comprising policy analysis, literature review, interviews with senior planners and policymakers, and an online survey, the study evaluates the extent of strategic alignment between Northern Ireland and Ireland and identifies opportunities and challenges for future collaboration.

The findings reveal that strategic spatial planning has become an increasingly important mechanism for shaping sustainable development across the island since the introduction of Northern Ireland’s Regional Development Strategy (2001) and Ireland’s National Spatial Strategy (2002), both influenced by European concepts of territorial cohesion and polycentric development. While local government reforms and cross-border networks have strengthened cooperation and created new “soft spaces” for engagement, significant structural barriers remain.

The research highlights a growing risk of strategic divergence. Ireland has modernised its planning framework through the National Planning Framework (2018; revised 2025), while Northern Ireland continues to rely on the Regional Development Strategy 2035, last updated in 2012. This widening temporal and policy gap threatens long-term spatial coherence across the island. The paper concludes that, while strong foundations for cross-border planning exist, addressing shared challenges will require a transition from cooperation towards deeper collaboration.

The built environment contributes 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, excluding transport. This necessarily places planning at the centre of the net-zero agenda. Yet, in many countries around the world, a persistent gap exists between policy ambition and delivery. While many planners enter the profession motivated by environmental and social justice goals, their capacity to realise low-carbon outcomes is routinely undermined by political narratives that portray planning as a brake on growth and economic development.

This presentation will explore the social, economic and environmental limitations of growth-orientated planning and illustrate how the pervasive growth mindset prevents the realisation of climate goals. With the aim of being provocative, we will introduce a series of radical alternatives – green growth, post-growth, and degrowth – and consider whether a change in direction is possible. Proposing and defining a concept we call ‘urban retrofit’, we argue for a compromise between radical growth alternatives – one that evolves into a strategic and restorative approach to planning that is multi-scalar and justice-orientated.

Looking to the future, we will sketch out why planning must recognise its vulnerabilities and seek to move decisively and collectively beyond ‘approving sprawl’ and toward the adaptive reuse of the built environment. This pathway is fraught with challenges and will require fundamental behavioural and institutional shifts – especially within planning where longstanding and often uncritical attachments to growth must be critically re-evaluated, however uncomfortable that might be.

As pressure to decarbonise the existing housing stock intensifies, conservation areas are frequently portrayed as sites where heritage protection and climate action are incompatible. Planning and heritage policy are often framed as obstacles to retrofit, yet there remains a lack of systematic empirical evidence on how Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) interpret and manage retrofit proposals in these contexts.

This paper draws on findings from a national survey of LPAs in England, exploring how planners understand and adjudicate retrofit within conservation areas. The analysis reveals that retrofit is widely supported in principle. The central challenge, however, is not whether retrofit can occur, but whether planning systems, guidance and knowledge infrastructures are sufficiently equipped to enable sensitive and effective low-carbon interventions. Key barriers include inconsistent guidance, variable knowledge quality and limited technical capacity, rather than conservation policy itself. At the same time, retrofit proposals are subject to additional scrutiny and procedural complexity, with decisions often hinging on considerations of design, materials, and visual impact.

Tensions between heritage protection and climate goals do arise (most notably in relation to external wall insulation and visually intrusive technologies) but these are typically managed through negotiation, alternative siting or revised designs rather than outright refusal. The survey highlights that the most significant obstacles to low-carbon retrofit are not heritage policies per se, but poor-quality applications, limited applicant and installer expertise, and a lack of clear national and local guidance. Respondents also point to misinformation, inconsistent policy signals, and subsidy schemes that promote inappropriate solutions as factors that exacerbate perceived conflicts.

Notably, many planners express a desire for a more proactive and enabling approach to decision-making. The paper contributes to debates on climate transitions and environmental planning by reframing conservation not as a barrier to action, but as a context that demands higher-quality, better-informed planning practice. In doing so, it positions planning as a critical mediator of just and effective climate transitions, “building planning up” rather than casting it as an impediment.

This paper discusses spatial planning discourses and individuals’ planning agency in relation to planning challenges within their legal, regulatory and policy context. While addressing national and international pertinent issues, fieldwork was conducted in the West Midlands, England to gain insights into the interpretations of planning policy and actual planning practices, especially the tensions and potential conflicts within and between environmental and economic interpretations and interests. The motivation for the research is to elicit the scope and extent of (eco-)systems-based thinking in urban development practices and related decision-making processes (and conversely what clouds and hinders this). Research questions include: (1) What are the current environmental governance and urban planning discourses? (2) What worldviews/meanings can be observed in the making, interpretation and application of planning policies; with specific attention to the extent of ‘dualism’ being evident (e.g. human–nature; rural–urban; social–economic)? (3) What priorities and actions are suggested to improve (and achieve strong) sustainability in the West Midlands? (4) How can planning more effectively address complex development challenges? A mixed methods approach is used including policy analysis, interviews and Q-methodology with 39 participants, to identify and analyse different perspectives of actors involved in spatial planning processes and perceived opportunities and capacity to generate environmental, social and economic sustainability. The research is currently still in progress and by the time of the conference key parts completed; therefore, findings from across the different methods ready to be shared.

This paper applies a critical spatial lens to investigate the complex process of refugee integration, focusing specifically on the experiences of Muslim women refugees in Bristol, UK. Rather than viewing cities as passive contexts for policy implementation, the paper positions them as active spatial arenas where inclusion—understood through access, rights, and belonging—is materially shaped. Grounded in principles of spatial justice, the research addresses the core question: what role do urban environment play in shaping Muslim refugee women lived experiences of integration?

Findings are drawn from a doctoral study using qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and participatory mapping (emotional and cognitive) with Muslim refugee women. This approach captures the intersectionality of their experiences, demonstrating how faith, gender, and refugee status converge to produce distinct spatial barriers and opportunities.

The analysis develops across three interconnected themes. First, women’s initial encounters with the host city reveal how housing allocation, neighbourhood level, and the spatial configuration of services condition accessibility, visibility, and perceptions of belonging. These configurations often reproduce marginalisation through gendered and racialised dynamics, limiting integration pathways.

Second, the study explores how integration is negotiated as a lived practice of spatial inclusion, through everyday mobility and activation of social infrastructure including community networks. These practices enable women to navigate urban barriers and exercise spatial agency.

Third, the findings reveal how women claim presence in public space and negotiate belonging, performing forms of urban citizenship despite heightened hostility and Islamophobia. This occurs within the paradox of Bristol’s ‘City of Sanctuary’ identity versus lived exclusion.

The paper concludes that integration is materialised through everyday practices of spatial inclusion. It calls for urban planning approaches that move beyond top-down frameworks, recognising the embodied, intersectional, and lived experiences of marginalised communities as fundamental to designing inclusive cities.

Africa’s long-term economic growth, democratic governance, and digital transformation depend on moving women from the margins of participation to positions of influence, ownership, and decision-making. While progress has been made in recognizing the value of women’s leadership, the next frontier requires policies, financing mechanisms, institutional reforms, and leadership development models that enable women to shape systems at scale. Women executive leaders advance the future of African cities through governance and planning practices that centre safety, dignity, sanitation, beautification, youth opportunity, civic pride, and economic resilience. By examining women executive leaders in Masaka and Nansana, Uganda, and Windhoek, Namibia the paper explores how leadership is activated over time through training, skills, capacitation, mentorship, and enabling environments that allow women leaders to thrive. Building on scholarship showing that women’s leadership can improve governance and economic outcomes, and that leadership prototypes often include participatory, team-oriented, and transformational dimensions, this paper proposes a set of urban leadership archetypes for African city governance and planning: the Steward of Public Trust, the Systems Reformer, the Community Mobilizer, the Economic Opportunity Builder, and the Civic Dignity Restorer. These archetypes illuminate how women leaders govern by connecting service delivery to empowerment, and empowerment to city stability through data-driven and evidence-based performance routines. Women leadership in urban governance is not simply about representation, but about transforming how cities identify problems using data, mobilize communities, and restore public trust. Africa’s transformation requires the full participation of women as agenda-setters, system-builders, and decision-makers.

How do we design a city that is not something to be fixed and containing lives, but something to be rehearsed? This paper proposes the concept of the impossible city as a feminist urban ontology; one that refuses singular narratives of inclusivity and instead attends to negotiated and differential conditions of belonging. Drawing on an ongoing participatory interdisciplinary research project in Bristol, the paper explores how women navigate, unsettle, and reimagine urban space through collective movement and encounter.

Bristol, in the Southwest of England, is approached as an impossible city where progressive imaginaries coexist with deep spatial inequalities, racialised exclusions, and uneven infrastructures of visibility. Rather than treating inclusivity as a policy goal or promised project, the research examines it as a situated and relational practice shaped by embodied negotiation. It is common that often privileged professionals take and occupy the standpoint of marginalised groups, to ‘make places of belonging’. The project is informed by feminist theories of differential belonging (Rowe), asking how people consciously move between positions, alliances, and places without fixing identity or belonging to a single location.

The paper advances choreography as epistemology as a way of exploring urban grammars, Bristol’ reciprocity of bodies’ navigations and encounters. Empirical material is generated through feminist epistemologies including participatory mapping and choreographic workshops with women in Bristol. These practices surface encounters where memories and belongings are unsettled, allowing participants to imagine alternative relations to place and to one another.

The paper argues how belonging is unmade and remade through embodied encounters, which inform strategies for relational understanding of place-making. Exploring relationships and reciprocity between bodies (buildings, people, non-humans) and systems this research aims to reach to spatial possibilities obscured by representational or policy-driven approaches.

Scotland’s tenements are an enduring legacy of Victorian and Edwardian urban expansion, providing a unique urban form and character to Scottish cities. In Glasgow, while many were swept away by 20^th century comprehensive redevelopment, the remaining stock was systematically improved through innovative citizen-led housing associations in the 1970s, or were of high enough existing quality in middle class areas. Today, tenements are a popular housing choice, combining space, heritage, compact development and cosmopolitan urban living.

Despite these benefits, many tenements in Glasgow are unprepared for the multiple challenges of climate change and energy insecurity. Many tenements have low energy efficiency, while the cost of heating homes continues to rise. Taking a ‘just transition’ standpoint, such challenges are compounded by those tenements occupied by housing association tenants, who receive a variety of housing or welfare subsidy. In addition, such tenants are pre-disposed to pre-existing vulnerabilities such as poor physical or mental health.

In 2019, the Southside Housing Association, The Scottish Government, Glasgow City Council and others, led a multi-stakeholder pilot initiative at Niddrie Road in Glasgow’s Southside, to retrofit an entire tenement building to the maximum energy efficiency standards possible. Following this, the research team from Centre for Housing Evidence (Cache) undertook qualitative post-occupancy evaluation interviews to ascertain the lived experience of living in these deep retrofitted tenements. In this paper we outline the perspectives of tenants living in these flats and what lessons we might learn for retrofitting housing for a just transition.

References

Gibb. K et al. (2023) ‘Niddrie Road, Glasgow: Tenement Retrofit Evaluation’. UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence.

The UK Government's Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 removed statutory consultation requirements for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England, citing concerns that the process hitherto had created a "doom loop" of endless consultation that delayed projects without improving outcomes for either projects or host communities. Critics of the Government have claimed that this move will just reduce democratic oversight and public voice in planning. There is, however, a paucity of empirical evidence about what constitutes meaningful consultation in NSIPs and for whom.

Addressing this gap, this paper reports the findings of a mixed methods study of consultation practice focussed on the experiences of both project applicants and consultees across multiple NSIPs, providing insight into what works, for whom, and with what outcomes.

Key findings point to the lack of shared understanding of the purpose of consultation, with applicants framing consultation in instrumental terms while consultees place greater emphasis on influence and fairness. This divergence in expectations is a consistent source of tension. The findings also point to critical success factors such as establishing clarity early about what can genuinely be influenced versus predetermined requirements; optimal timing and sequencing of consultation before positions become entrenched; and the value of recognising both tangible and intangible outcomes from consultation and engagement activities.

More broadly, these findings have implications for how the longstanding principle of public participation in planning is mediated within projects deemed to be in the national interest, where centralised decision-making frameworks intersect with expectations for localised democratic engagement.

Mapping can support children’s creative and critical engagement with their surroundings. Social mapping, in particular, enables children to express views about their local areas, exercise civic rights, and understand their place within complex social and spatial relationships.

Between September 2025 and July 2026, we worked with 239 children, including 145 from primary and 94 from secondary schools across urban and rural settings on Ynys Môn. Over three sessions, participants used creative, arts-based, photographic, video, and both online and offline methods to explore what they value in their communities and where changes are needed. Children created ‘social maps’ both 'on the map' (through stickers and annotations) and 'off the map' (through walking and discussion), extending beyond the limits of static cartography. They then translated these insights into digital form working 'in the map' using uMap, a web-based platform built on OpenStreetMap.

Social mapping proved a powerful approach for place-based learning. Children communicated experiences in articulate, creative, and critical ways, supported by diverse and inclusive methods. While some technological challenges arose, uMap was particularly effective with older participants, enabling real-time collaborative mapping. Combining arts-based and digital approaches offers a compelling way to communicate place-based needs among young people themselves and to wider audiences, including local authorities. Such approaches can support communities in Wales and beyond to understand social needs and inspire collective action.

The reuse of brownfield land for housing and mixed-use development has been a key tenet of planning policy for around 25 years. The premise is that redeveloping brownfield sites can tackle health and economic inequalities in our towns and cities at the same time as delivering new houses and other uses for people. This paper presents the findings from an analysis of secondary data to explore the social, economic and environmental impacts of brownfield sites and their redevelopment in England over the last twenty years. Using data related to the presence of brownfield land at the neighbourhood level and a suite of socioeconomic outcomes we found the strongest evidence for the impact of brownfield redevelopment comes from neighbourhood improvement, related to perceptions of safety, social cohesion, and increased health and life satisfaction. These are likely to provide indirect economic benefits, thereby making the case for Government investment in these neighbourhoods. Using the expected life satisfaction gain that would be associated with the removal of one unit of brownfield (exposure), we calculated the corresponding loss in income that would exactly offset the life satisfaction gain. The evidence for direct individual economic impacts in terms of residents’ economic participation is weaker, although an analysis of productivity found that there may be neighbourhood-level economic benefits in urban areas and perhaps suggests that mixed-use developments in urban areas may be more beneficial than solely residential developments.

This review provides an outline of current knowledge and experience regarding suburban renewal driven by the adaptive reuse of underutilised areas, and introduces the topic of greyfield-led regeneration.

‘Greyfields’ refers to underused or declining suburban sites such as retail centres, business parks, and large surface parking lots. Internationally—particularly in the US, Australia, and Canada—these sites are recognised as prime opportunities to counter urban sprawl. Due to their central locations, low plot ratios, strong transport connections, and proximity to social infrastructure, greyfields offer significant potential to be transformed into medium-density, mixed-use centres of neighbouring communities. The need for suburban regeneration is driven by rapid urbanisation, demographical changes, shifting working and shopping patterns, and climate change, making sustainable growth and affordable housing critically important.

Structurally, the first part of the review outlines the transformation of urban planning frameworks in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, thereby establishing a theoretical foundation for suburban regeneration through urban initiatives such as New Urbanism, the Compact City, and the 15-minute City. The second part examines the implementation of those concepts in international literature and practice, focusing on countries with sprawl challenges similar to those in Ireland. Finally, the Irish approach to suburban regeneration will be presented, addressing urban sprawl amid the current housing and affordability crisis. While Irish planning discourse strongly advocates for compact growth and land activation, policy and practice focus almost exclusively on large brownfields and pocketed greenfield developments. In Ireland, greyfields remain mostly unrecognised as a problem and as an opportunity.

Low‑income residents in Cornwall face intensifying barriers to accessing quality housing, particularly affordable low‑carbon homes, as property prices continue to rise due to second‑home ownership, tourism pressures, and the rapid growth of short‑term rentals such as Airbnb. These dynamics, compounded by counter‑urbanisation and restrictive planning frameworks, have deepened rural housing poverty and entrenched deprivation. Addressing the limited availability of feasible solutions, this study develops an Innovative Planning‑Led Sustainability Model designed to incentivise housing developers to deliver more affordable low‑carbon homes in rural contexts.

Funded by the Cal Henderson Foundation, the project draws on interdisciplinary expertise to integrate emerging technologies and sustainable design practices, offering a replicable approach to future housing development. The model also examines how local planning authorities can leverage planning conditions to require the incorporation of environmentally sustainable materials and design principles as part of the development approval process. By doing so, it provides a practical tool for mitigating the pressures of Cornwall’s overheated housing market, particularly the influx of second‑home buyers, while supporting local progress toward net‑zero policy targets.

The model was developed through a two‑stage research design. The first stage involved extensive secondary analysis of academic literature, government policy, and industry reports to construct an initial conceptual framework. The second stage refined this framework through two focus‑group workshops employing thematic brainstorming and grounded theory. Insights generated from these workshops were synthesised and integrated into the final model, offering a novel planning‑led approach to delivering affordable low‑carbon housing in rural England.

Land value capture has become an important mechanism for funding infrastructure and public goods by harnessing increases in land value generated through planning decisions. Among the most widely used forms in the United Kingdom are negotiated Developer Contributions (DCs), yet their adoption and operation remain uneven across jurisdictions. This paper examines the emergence and implementation of DCs in Northern Ireland following the 2015 reform of local government, which transferred planning powers to local authorities for the first time and created new opportunities for this use.

Drawing on a mixed-methods research design combining policy analysis, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews, the study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the development of DCs in Northern Ireland. It investigates both the practical operation of the mechanism and the perspectives of public, private, and civil society stakeholders regarding its purpose and future role within the planning system.

The findings reveal significant tensions and competing narratives surrounding the function of DCs. While some stakeholders frame them principally as a regulatory tool to mitigate development impacts and ensure development acceptability, others advocate a more expansive role, positioning DCs as a mechanism for capturing development value to deliver wider public benefits and support strategic planning objectives. The Northern Ireland case demonstrates how an emerging planning culture can create conditions for contestation, shaping power relations and reinforcing ambiguity regarding the role of DCs. The study contributes to wider debates on land value capture, governance, and planning reform by highlighting the challenges of embedding new policy instruments within evolving institutional contexts.

Planning scholarship is beginning to recognise the importance of time and temporality in spatial governance debates, with Parker and Dobson (2025) underlining the prescience of “uchronia" or the concept of ideal time in the determination of local plans and planning applications. This paper applies this concept to the urban governance approach of Birmingham, a city with a long track record in the planning and execution of large-scale regeneration projects. It focuses on the hosting of the 2022 Commonwealth Games which were seen by policy makers as a catalyst for achieving some long-established ambitions for revitalisation of the Perry Barr district in the north-west of the city. The paper argues that the tight timescale of delivery and urgency of associated planning processes led to a temporal speeding up before the Games to expedite the essential works for the hosting of the two week event itself. But a corresponding lack or urgency post-Games created challenges for the fulfilment of wider legacy in the Perry Barr district where policy ambitions not accompanied by institutional structures, resourcing and processes needed to realise more lasting regeneration benefits. The paper concludes by reflecting more boradly on the importance of time to entrepreneurial modes of urban governance as an area that has been underresearched.

Planning inevitably involves the activity of making and using plans. Planning is nevertheless often criticised in this core function of making plans and using them to guide action and decision-making. Criticisms include making plans that are overly complex or incapable of implementation. Additional criticisms include the challenge of preparing plans within appropriate timescales and keeping them relevant and up-to-date. These and other criticisms call for a contemporary exploration of the continuing role of plans in planning systems.

This paper provides a conceptual and practical exploration of the contemporary role, relevance and nature of plans using the British planning systems as context. The conceptual dimension examines critical questions around the purpose, type and currency of plans in a contemporary planning context – are plans still relevant and, if so, what type of plans? What do plans ‘do’ in the contemporary era? What might be practical alternatives to the traditional types of plans that planners produce? The practical exploration is grounded in the British planning systems that are characterised by significant decision-maker discretion yet are defined as ‘plan-led’. Changing legal and policy presumptions have impacted on the practical status of plans – and continuing challenges in keeping plans up-to-date alongside national policy imperatives have arguably diminished the role of plans in decision-making. The paper concludes with a critical review of whether the ‘plan-led’ system is increasingly a ‘plan-less’ one.

Digital technologies have evolved rapidly in the last three decades and are now used daily by planners to process applications, visualise data, communicate with stakeholders, and complete administrative tasks. Despite this integration of digital technology into planning practice, the planning systems within all UK nations have largely remained static in their legal requirements, processes and methods. Simultaneous to these changes, planners in the UK’s devolved planning systems and local planning authorities have faced declining resourcing, growing workloads, and challenges recruiting and retaining staff. While several digital planning pilot projects have been launched/implemented in England and Scotland since 2020, progress in Wales has been slower and more focused on broader issues of public service delivery, digital inclusion, foundational infrastructure, and some exploratory work in planning. As a result, there is a gap in our understanding of digital planning practices in Wales. This research establishes a benchmark of digital planning practices in Wales, and the capacity of local planning authorities (LPAs) to engage with digital planning. The research draws on a desktop review of existing policies, online survey, and two focus groups with professional planners in Wales. The study revealed significant variation in the technical capacity of LPAs to adopt more advanced digital planning technologies and reflects on these to makes specific recommendations on digital planning to ease resource pressures and improve planning outcomes in Wales.

Consultant procurement by the public sector is not a new phenomenon and the tensions that exist between both, in practice and in changes to the built environment from such engagements, have long been studied by planning scholars and experienced by planning practitioners. However, the digitalisation of planning and the embrace of technological tools, many of which are on the cusp of radically altering planning (i.e., digital twins, AI), is generating increasing dependencies on consultants. Despite awareness of how digitalisation is shaping the planning profession, research at the intersection of digitalisation and the role of consultants in this transition is lacking. This paper contributes to this lacuna in a three-part argument: 1) data-driven planning has widened the opening for private sector intervention; 2) this creates a dependence on consultants and furthers the loss of specialist knowledge; and 3) consultants stand to monopolise and privatise public sector data. The argument is supported by a review of Ireland’s 31 local authority development plans and a tool developed by central government to determine housing need and demand projections over a twenty-year period. Results of the review demonstrate existing variations in the development plans between those informed by consultants versus those completed in-house, and between local authorities who procured certain consultants over others. The implications of public sector dependency on consultants matters, not only for the reasons stated above, but because the digitalisation of planning will continue to march forward and the question hinges on the role of the public sector in this evolution.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, and urban datarization are fundamentally reshaping how planning knowledge is produced, contested, and applied. While these technologies promise efficiency and evidence-based decision-making, they also risk narrowing the epistemological foundations of planning privileging algorithmic rationality over locally embedded, participatory, and socially responsive ways of knowing. This tension is especially acute in the Global South, where rapid urbanization, widespread informality, and uneven digital infrastructures complicate the uncritical adoption of data-driven planning models predominantly developed in Western contexts. Drawing on Foucault's concept of power/knowledge alongside spatial justice frameworks, the paper situates AI-driven planning within broader struggles over whose knowledge counts, who governs urban space, and on whose terms. It argues that smart-city paradigms, as currently conceived, risk reproducing colonial and technocratic logics that sideline informal realities, local expertise, and community voice precisely the conditions most prevalent across Global South cities. Responding to the conference theme of Building Planning Up, this paper proposes a spatial justice-oriented framework for ethical, participatory AI-enabled planning. It contributes to debates on theoretical renewal, methodological innovation, and disciplinary identity arguing that critically re-examining planning's intellectual foundations is essential to ensuring the discipline remains inclusive, reflective, and fit for purpose in an age of artificial intelligence.

Urban food systems are increasingly recognised as arenas for addressing climate resilience, food security, social inclusion and sustainable urban development. Yet food-related planning responsibilities often remain fragmented across municipal departments, market regulations, environmental policy and community initiatives. This research examines how community-based food initiatives and participatory governance processes generate planning-relevant knowledge for sustainable urban food transitions.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted within the SURFIT project in Kraków, Poland, the study combines insights from ten sustainable food initiatives and three multi-stakeholder workshops involving farmers, market organisers, municipal officers, public institutions, NGOs and researchers. Using a transition-oriented and relational perspective, it analyses how grassroots food networks create, translate and scale their impact through everyday practices, community engagement, institutional collaboration and access to urban infrastructures.

The findings show that sustainable food initiatives function not only as alternative forms of food provision, but also as socio-spatial infrastructures of learning, participation and urban experimentation. Their transformative potential depends on multiple scaling pathways, including horizontal diffusion, cultural change, institutional recognition and embedding within broader governance arrangements. At the same time, these processes remain shaped by resource fragility, regulatory constraints, uneven access to space and selective institutional recognition.

The research contributes to debates on community engagement, co-production and environmental planning by showing how urban food initiatives can help “build planning up” from situated practices and relational forms of knowledge. It argues that planning scholarship can benefit from treating food networks as relational spaces where future urban food systems are imagined, negotiated and practiced.

While the professional standing of planning is commonly justified by advancing the 'public interest’, public confidence is being eroded by ever increasing threats and demands such as climate change, energy, housing crisis, political and economic instability. As a future-oriented discipline and practice, planning has the capacity, at least the remit, to coordinate a more desired future and the new Planning and Development Act 2024 in Ireland aims to reposition the role of planning in leading Ireland to a stable, resilient sustainable future. New measures aim to enhance clarity, improve consistency, and increase confidence in the planning system. It’s seen as a move to a “plan-led” as opposed to ‘development enablement’ (Lennon & Waldron, 2019) approach to planning. It includes new statutory timelines for decisions, new tools and a shift from a six year to a ten-year local authority plan for long-term, strategic sustainable development. However, considering the number and complexity of transitions required to achieve sustainable development these measures cannot, on their own, achieve national and European sustainable development policy objectives. Each of these transitions and pathways to achieve them, is associated with different interests, specific actors, imply a variety of cultural and political commitments; sustainability transitions happen in place. This paper therefore argues that with these new legislative requirements, it is now time to progress the mantra of, for the ‘public interest’ to ‘for the public with the public’.

Originating from research conducted during an Horizon Europe Project, FLIARA, this paper aims to combine findings from its participatory futures foresight work with theories from sustainability transitions (MLP framework) to develop a framework for planning practice that can enable true public participation and deliver ‘actionable knowledge’ (Hölscher, 2023) that can facilitate sustainable niche innovations to emerge, take hold and lead to transformative change. As the research was related to gender, rural based and employed a rural typology, the paper also adds to knowledge on the gender and spatial dimensions of sustainability transitions.

References:

Hölscher, K., Wittmayer, J.M., Olfert, A., Hirschnitz-Garbers, M., Walther, J. and Schiller, G. (2023) ‘Creating actionable knowledge one step at a time: An analytical framework for tracing systems and agency in niche innovation pathways’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 46, 100682. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2022.11.007

Lennon, M., & Waldron, R. (2019) Overview of the Irish planning system. European planning studies De-democratising the Irish planning system, European Planning Studies, 27(8), pp. 1607–1625.

Stroke survivors often encounter challenges in community ambulation due to gait impairments. Evidence indicates that stroke survivors demonstrate adequate walking ability in clinical and residential settings but undergo considerable challenges when navigating transitional spaces between these settings in urban contexts. These attributes stem from unpredictability and challenging outdoor conditions. Hence, it is essential to support stroke survivors to re-engage in their daily community activities. A substantial gap remains in design approaches for transitional urban environments that bridge clinical and residential settings to support stroke survivors’ daily community activities. This study aims to identify urban environmental factors that affect stroke survivors’ mobility in transitional urban environments.

Stroke is considered the single largest cause of adult disability in Northern Ireland. Consequently, this study is conducted in West and North Belfast, which encompasses super output areas identified as among the most health-deprived in Northern Ireland. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining planning policy analysis with built environmental interventions. Stroke survivors in West and North Belfast are purposively selected, and their perspectives on urban environmental determinants of mobility are recorded using the focus group photo–elicitation method. Following thematic and policy analysis, an innovative planning strategy is implemented and developed further through stakeholder input and collaboration.

This study offers insights for urban planners and policymakers to guide and improve necessary changes in planning and policy development processes. Overall, the findings underscore valuable insights for fostering a mobility-friendly urban environment for stroke survivors undergoing post-stroke rehabilitation, thereby supporting and enhancing inclusivity in urban planning.

We live in times of tragic trajectories witnessing a complex interplay of impacts from deep-seated social, economic and environmental problems – characterised by disparity and decline. Instead of turning a blind eye or despairing, can we imagine and implement more equitable and less disastrous alternatives? Which theoretical foundations of planning or new inspirations can help us inform and transform planning governance and practice to be fit for the 2030s and beyond?

The round table links to current research on city region planning from a critical realist perspective. The specific themes and invited speakers have been selected for their pertinence in discussing and addressing persisting thorny issues and choices that challenge the current status quo and simplistic mainstream rhetoric of ‘green growth’ or ‘digital transformation’ as a solution.

The participants offer insights from and for planning theory, policy and practice; how to make connections between different strands of research and evolving thinking to disrupt or realign existing trajectories and forge new pathways in planning.

In ever-polarising societies, efforts at land use mediation and agreement between contesting parties are needed more than ever. There is increased scrutiny on roles, responsibilities and representation with pressure to find agreed solutions to social, economic and environmental problems at a range of scales. In this paper, we critically review literatures on policy mediation via the co-construction of knowledge. We then examine a case study from Wales where policy experts were brought together in a hybrid forum to explore ways community assets might be passed on to groups to control them directly. Stakeholders knew at the start of the policy engagement process that they must arrive at a mutually satisfactory outcome. But who steers the solution narrative and how can participants in the process best ensure that the sharing of evidence leads to political traction? Through contemporaneous notes, qualitative interviews, the project’s reports and other documents, we offer intellectual, methodological and policy contributions on mediation and agreement breakdown. We find that some participants from more formal institutional settings are actually unable to ‘leave their expertise at the door’ as recommended. Instead, notions of representation loom large. Some participants with different professional expertises retained a strong desire to control solution narratives. While entirely logical and understandable for these particular stakeholders, arriving at an efficient and equitable solution for all parties was ultimately compromised because of the key issues of roles, responsibilities and representation that we highlight. We conclude with policy implications for contested land use decision-making.

This paper highlights socio-environmental inequalities as consequences of urban regeneration projects in post-industrial sites within suburbs. Transforming inner-city industrial sites such as those in Fishponds, Bristol discussed in this paper, remains challenging for urban planning and for local authorities such as Bristol City Council (BCC). These sites on the one hand provide opportunities for regeneration and housing, yet on the other hand their historical detachment from surrounding neighbourhoods can persist if redevelopment sidelines local perspectives on what constitutes a sustainable neighbourhood. If such detachment, both physically and mentally, between existing communities and industrial sites is not explored properly, it can result in less meaningful engagement during consultation process and further inequalities that can be simply framed as consequences of regeneration projects.

The paper highlights the role of creative methods for capturing diverse experiences, memories and relations shaped by the industrial sites in the neighbourhood. Exploring the place and mapping relations with local community including Fishponds Planning Community Group (FPCG) during two workshops shows multiple narratives of place and the risk of reducing them through consultation process. Multivocal Fishponds include a series of co-produced narratives of Fishponds highlighting communities’ multiple and contradictory priorities. Such approach upskills local communities to gain a wider understanding of their places and needs, to engage meaningfully with planners and developers in future, when regeneration schemes reach planning application stage. It also contributes to much needed justice framework in regeneration projects to tackle longstanding socio-ecological inequalities and planning approaches that at best take a provisional approach rather than transforming places, including their narratives and aesthetics with the local communities.

What conditions need to be in place for spatial planning and public health to integrate effectively? This paper argues that planning scholarship has prioritised how integration should work, without first ascertaining whether the foundational conditions for integration exist. Inspired by a growing body of research and best practice on integrating the two disciplines, the 4 E's Evaluative Framework was developed in response to a critical gap. Existing analytical tools carry assumptions about institutional capacity and governance maturity that reflect the established systems in which they were developed, rendering them poorly suited to contexts where integration is emergent rather than embedded.

The 4 E's Evaluative Framework, comprising Equity, Embeddedness, Enabling Environment, and Evidence, represents an original methodological and theoretical contribution to this problem. Grounded in critical realism and systems thinking, the framework is designed to assess the structural and governance conditions that enable or constrain planning-health integration, before evaluating how effectively it operates. Drawing on regional planning policy and comparative local council practice in Northern Ireland, the framework maps the current state of planning-health integration and identifies structural gaps across both scales.

Northern Ireland provides an illuminating case, a devolved, post-conflict jurisdiction where planning and public health operate within parallel traditions, health considerations appear inconsistently across Local Development Plans, and governance fragmentation shapes what integration is structurally possible. The paper proposes emergent governance contexts as a distinct analytical category within planning theory, with implications for how the field conceptualises the relationship between institutional structure, knowledge production, and health-equitable outcomes.

The research explores the relationship between the discipline of spatial planning and wider public policymaking in Ireland across spatial scales, and specifically in this paper, the realities of how planning legislation is conceived, shaped and governed.

The legislative and policy framework for spatial planning in Ireland has recently been reviewed and is subject to change. These changes suggest a shift towards the primary function of planning being concerned with process, and one that is increasingly administrative, technical, and legal in nature. Arguably an emphasis on processes may be to the detriment of the wider, normative, intended policy outcomes which we seek to achieve and which are more closely aligned with the concept of spatial planning.

The literature describes the policy tools of spatial planning as under researched and lacking conceptual clarity. This research seeks to explore recent changes to planning legislation through the lens of procedural and substantive policy tools to understand better the relationship between the function of spatial planning and wider public policymaking in Ireland.

The research uses content analysis to analyse the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Planning and Development Bill 2023 and aims to draw conclusions as to the perceived function of the legislation viewed through the lens of policy tools, which will contribute to the conceptualisation of planning policy tools; the understanding of interaction of procedural and substantive policy tools; and the relationship between the planning system and wider, normative intended public policy outcomes.

The increasing attention being paid to time and temporalities in planning is now significant (Dobson and Parker, 2024; 2025; Jensen et al, 2025; Hutter and Wiechmann, 2022; Lennon and Tubridy, 2022; Laurian and Inch, 2019) and existing and emerging scholarship indicates the multiple possible avenues for research on time and temporalities in planning in Europe and beyond. Drawing on work that reviews and critiques time and its use in planning (Parker and Dobson, 2026 forthcoming; Dobson and Parker, 2024), the paper reflects on six identified modalities or themes of time and the multiple temporalities involved in planning. One important aspect of this research agenda is bringing time back into centre stage in the politics of planning and place, given that practices involving the manipulation of time for planning and urban governance cut across territories and demonstrate how governmental priorities necessitate changes to systems and policy or processes. Such understanding can also reveal how timing, speed or squeezes of process may marginalise some voices or issues, as well as limit the event horizon for planning in the face of long-term challenges. When positioned amongst pre-existing literature on time and planning, the six perceptible modalities presented are active ways of shaping or using time in planning research and practice. These groupings function as a useful framework for giving shape to the development of planning theory and research agendas and further exploration of the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in planning studies (Dobson and Parker, 2024; Wiechman and Hutter, 2024).

The integrated rural development of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries serves as a vision of balanced and embedded rural development through new spatial models of the rural complex under China's Rural Revitalisation strategy. In practice, however, these projects frequently disembed from their rural surroundings. Existing research seldom explores the enclavisation of rural integrated development (including primary, secondary, and tertiary industries) and its mechanism. Drawing on Lefebvre's ‘representation of space’, this study argues that the enclave is inscribed before the boundary is built and is also generated within conceived space. The argument is developed through a typical case study of a rural complex in China, organised around three mechanisms. Firstly, as the national vision of integrated development is transmitted top-down across administrative scales, it is recoded as a tourism-led programme that displaces the slow, localised, use-value rationale of agriculture. In addition, urban background planners, working under compressed project timelines and standardisation pressures, reproduce a replicable urban-park aesthetic for the rural landscape. Moreover, every relevant party focuses on exchange value or political performance, while the rural dimension secures no advocate in the process. This study conceptualises the outcome as a representation of enclavisation and challenges collaborative planning theory. The failure of planning does not lie in distorted communication but in the efficient alignment of elite values and external power. Rural planning should thereby attend less to procedural deliberation and more to the question of whose conceived spaces are ultimately embedded in plan-making.

Determining ‘valid knowledge’ and ‘the facts that matter’ are key concerns in planning practice and literature, but much existing theory places agency on the planner to determine validity while overlooking the structural mechanisms that surround complex decision-making in planning practice. This research applies the philosophy of critical realism to identify key elements of structure including a critical realist conception of structural hegemony, alongside political rationalities, public policy doctrines such as the public interest, and professional ethics. These concepts are proposed as key causal mechanisms impacting upon decision-making and the determination of valid knowledge. Referencing an empirical case study of the siting of a waste-to-energy incinerator in the UK context, the research identifies a hegemonic lag whereby hegemonic rationalities and doctrines actualise decisions that endure through subsequent planning processes despite political and public contestation, and changes in policy, local context, and planning personnel. This hegemonic lag is proposed as an explanation of why complex planning decisions often become controversial.  

It is still unclear why residents define certain geographical areas as their neighbourhoods, and this lack of clarity has a profound impact on urban decision-making. The aim of this research has been to develop a conceptual model for self-defined neighbourhoods. I conducted a mental mapping activity with 15 residents from Dublin 8 in Ireland representing different sociodemographic characteristics, housing typologies and duration of residency. Dublin 8 is a postal code area in the inner city of Dublin chosen for its urban and social diversity. In 1:1 meetings which lasted two hours, I asked each resident to rate their neighbourhood satisfaction and draw a memory map of the area that came to mind when they gave their opinions followed by deep discussions for the reasons. While theories define a neighbourhood as the area reachable within 15 minutes walk in all directions from home, the research revealed that residents perceive their neighbourhoods as a sector of the area they walk, with their home often situated at the edge rather than the center. This sector can range from a single street to a 20 minute walk from their home and can be an area or a network of streets. The research helped in identifying some of the factors that shape self-defined neighbourhoods and developing a conceptual model to represent them. This can help in predicting the area that a resident will consider as their neighbourhood and in turn narrowing the gap between neighbourhood design and user experience.

Green Infrastructure (GI) has been predominately researched as an urban concept. However, it can be argued that its principles of promoting connected networks of green and blue spaces to support multi-functional landscapes has significant value in rural as well as urban locations. Rural GI is under researched with limited consideration within the wider discussion of environmental praxis. Other activities, i.e., agriculture, forestry and conservation, dominate management discourses in rural environmental thinking limiting opportunities for a more holistic approach to GI thinking to be tested in these places. Moreover, land use in rural areas, especially at the landscape scale, is subject to complex ownership and management issues. Changes in legislation focussed on “nature” recovery and landscape functionality further complicate these debates. There is though a growing recognition within both traditional rural land and in contemporary ecological advocacy that the restoration of nature can be politically, socio-economically, and environmentally positive.

To examine this process the requires an unpacking of the visible changes in rural land use policy to refocus debates from a GI perspective. Such an approach offers insights into how the principles of GI can be used to address climate change, biodiversity, food security, and changing rural livelihoods on current land use. By arguing that the focus of policy on nature positive planning with designations and policy initiatives promotes the use of GI it remains uncertain whether this translates into resilient landscape scale land management. The outcomes of this discussion illustrate that GI in rural contexts constitutes a distinctly different approach to those applied in urban areas, and is characterised by landscape-scale management issues and reflections of existing livelihood practices. Positive uses of GI is supported through dynamic institutional arrangements, diverse governance options, and local socio-economic conditions. Thus, by reflecting on the governance of GI in rural areas it provides scope to move beyond static assessments of functionality towards an understanding of the institutional environments and local social structures within which GI is embedded.

With the profound and accelerating decline of urban centres as places for retail traditionally
supported by high levels of footfall and chain retailers, there is an emerging trend of urban areas introducing urban greening as a way to try to improve a range of environmental and social factors including increasing dwell time, socialisation and footfall alongside people’s physical and mental wellbeing. This paper, which focuses on the findings from a BBSRC-funded impact project alongside a recently submitted ESRC New Investigator Grant, critically evaluates the economic and environmental impacts of urban greening in a postindustrial landscape (West Bromwich). Additionally, it explores the different typologies of funding of greening interventions including public sector funded (West Bromwich), private sector funded (Colmore Business Improvement District) and mixed funding (Coventry City Centre). It examines the emerging implications for theory and practice and develops policy recommendations whilst reflecting on the broader changes in the funding landscape for the repurposing of urban centres.

Access to greenspace is unequal across England. Recently, there has been a lot of attention on the lack of access to greenspace in new developments despite Natural England’s Greenspace Standards setting the expectation for access. This study explores the extent to which new developments across England meet these standards, focusing on Doorstep, Local and Neighbourhood Greenspaces. The analysis uses spatial data to generate approximate major development sites completed between 2000 and 2024, which are then compared to the standards for Doorstep, Local or Neighbourhood greenspace. Land Cover data from 2000 was also used to explore whether development on more urban land fared differently from those on less urban land. Overall, around 66% of sites completed after 2000 have access to Doorstep Greenspace (0.5ha within 200m), 60% have access to Local Greenspace (2ha within 300m) and 61% have access to Neighbourhood Greenspace (10ha within 1km). Furthermore access to all types of greenspace appears to have decreased by around 15% between 2000 and 2024; down to 47%, 42% and 50% for access to Doorstep, Local and Neighbourhood Greenspaces respectively. Access to greenspace on the ‘discontinuous urban fabric’ landcover is greater than overall at 69%, 64% and 66% for Doorstep, Local and Neighbourhood Greenspaces respectively compared with sites on ‘non-built’ landcover at 57%, 46% and 40%. This suggests a worrying trend where increasing numbers of new homes are being built without good access to greenspaces and that this is particularly stark for greenfield developments that do not benefit from access to existing greenspaces.

Urban design and place‑making are frequently positioned as vehicles for delivering inclusive, liveable cities, yet planning and design research often struggles to account for how places are actually shaped through everyday, informal use. This paper advances a central argument: urban place is produced not only through formal design intentions, but through ongoing, often unplanned practices that appropriate and reinterpret designed space. Recognising these practices is essential for strengthening place‑based planning.

The paper draws on doctoral research examining everyday use of urban greenspaces. It employs unstructured observations combined with mapping to document how students occupy, adapt, and use designed greenspaces in ways that frequently sit outside intended programmes or regulatory frameworks. On this basis, the paper introduces the concept of guerrilla use as an analytic term to describe informal, user‑led spatial practices that quietly subvert, extend, or repurpose urban design without explicit permission or formal recognition.

The findings demonstrate that guerrilla use plays a significant role in shaping comfort, attachment, and sense of place, revealing experiential dynamics that are largely invisible within conventional planning and urban design evaluation tools. By showing how everyday practices interact with micro‑scale design conditions, the paper challenges dominant place‑making approaches that prioritise visual coherence or predefined uses over lived experience.

The paper’s contribution lies in conceptualising guerrilla use as a critical lens for urban design and place‑making research, bridging experiential evidence and spatial analysis. It argues that recognising informal use can enhance planning’s capacity to support more responsive, inclusive, and genuinely place‑based urban design.

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are an increasingly prominent part of the urban governance landscape in contemporary England, having proliferated in cities and towns since their introduction in 2005.

However, the nature and implications of their role in urban planning agendas are not well researched in the academic debates, with most literature focusing on the longer-established North American context.

A particular knowledge gap is the growing direct role of BIDs in place-making - the creation and stewardship of new spaces within urban environments. This paper explores this phenomenon through a study of three BIDs in the city of Birmingham - Colmore CBD, Jewellery Quarter, Southside – which are centrally located and directly involved in delivering significant place-making initiatives in recent years.

Drawing upon document analysis, grey literature, and interviews with key stakeholders, the paper examines the motivations and rationale behind the BIDs’ adoption of an accelerated place-making role. It also considers the dynamics of their relationship with the city council and other public authorities with regard to the design and implementation of new spaces; and it explores the nature of the new spaces/places themselves, questioning whose interests are being served in such complex, diverse city districts.

We conclude by drawing on these insights to reflect on the wider meaning of this trend – a positive process delivering substantive and welcome environmental benefits in a climate of public sector austerity, or a more problematic development that raises questions about the nature and durability of the governance transformations taking place in our central cities?

Child friendly city scholarship has been largely shaped by Global North experiences and frameworks, where formal public spaces and structured processes determine children’s participation in the public sphere. In contrast, children in many cities of the Global South experience urban life very differently. Informal streets, limited play spaces, unequal access to resources and exposure to environmental risks such as heat, flooding and pollution shape their everyday lives. At the same time, framing cities through a simple Global North - Global South divide can risk treating children’s experiences within these contexts as homogenous, overlooking how micro-geographies and local inequalities within cities shape urban encounters and consequently children’s wellbeing. And yet such nuances remain under-explored in the child friendly city discourse. This presentation draws on child-centred co-design projects in Dhaka (Bangladesh), Campo Grande (Brazil), Cardiff (Wales) and Poznań (Poland) to bring diverse contexts into critical dialogue. Using creative participatory methods- mapping, drawing, walk along interviews, and model-making, the research foregrounds children’s perceptions, spatial practices and future imaginaries. Framed through the concepts of ‘just city’ and ‘infrastructures of care’, the presentation argues for a context-sensitive, relational and justice-oriented approach to child-friendly urbanism. It moves beyond universalised Global North models to recognise informality, inequality, and climate vulnerability as central to children’s lived realities, and rethinks child-friendly urbanism as a pathway to support children’s wellbeing in rapidly urbanising contexts.

Working with artists and creative producers is now an established feature of both public and private development, mediating between creative practice, community participation, and the creation of site-specific work. This paper considers how artists can surface local narratives, overlooked histories, and community identities that are often absent from conventional consultation processes.

In doing so, artists can offer planners situated, nuanced knowledge to inform local area plans, embedding aesthetic, cultural, and experiential considerations into development processes.

The paper/presentation argues that artist-led engagement, which invites audiences to act not only as viewers but also as contributors, can strengthen community engagement throughout the planning process. It demonstrates the value that artists and creative producers bring to design teams, communities, and sites through place-responsive and co-designed practices that generate emotional, sensory, and embodied experiences, shaping how individuals perceive, inhabit, and form attachments to place.

The boundary between art and community engagement — whether understood as social, situational, or relational — is increasingly fluid. Within planning contexts, artists and creative practitioners can produce work that acquires new meanings, functions, and relationships through durational and collective experiences with communities and their stories. Through co-creation and co-design, public art can generate engaging narratives and support authentic, transparent, and purposeful involvement in the public realm.

Film is a long-established medium for the analysis, representation and commentary of the urban condition from a range of disciplines, including Geography, Sociology, and of course, Film Studies. Planners too have engaged with the potential of film, most notably Gold and Ward (1997), ‘Of Plans and Planners’, and Tewdwr-Jones, ‘Urban Reflections’ (2011).

Meanwhile, planning education frequently utilises film as a resource within courses that deal with planning history, such as utopian New Town promotional films such as Charley in New Town (1948) or analytical films exposing the conditions of the city, such as Glasgow: The Blight (1982). Yet a systemic pedagogy of film in planning education remains underdeveloped, despite pedagogical reflection on film appearing in allied disciplines such as Geography (Sigler and Albandos, 2013) and Architecture (Farso & Petersen, 2015).

At the University of Glasgow, students on the MSc City Planning co-create the ‘Urbanism Film Club’ where themes on the ‘urban’ are explored. This talk will explore some films from this club, grouped into three themes: documentary film, international film, and feature film. The paper will reflect on the value of film’s ability to complement and enhance learning and student experience on an MSc programme in City Planning, including the various challenges and considerations that need to be addressed.

Refs

Farsø, M., & Petersen, R. M. (2015). Conceiving Landscape through Film: Filmic Explorations in Design Studio Teaching. Architecture and Culture, 3(1), 65–86. https://doi.org/10.2752/205078215X14236574273664

Gold, J. and Ward, S. (1997) ‘Of Plans and Planners: Documentary film and the challenge of the urban future,1935–52’ in Clarke, D (ed). The Cinematic City. London: Routledge.

Sigler, T., & Albandoz, R. I. (2014). Beyond Representation: Film as a Pedagogical Tool in Urban Geography. Journal of Geography, 113(2), 58–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221341.2013.764918

Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2011) Urban Reflections: Narratives of place, planning and change. Policy Press. University of Bristol.

Assessment, as a pillar and one of the most essential components of teaching and learning practice in higher education, has drawn attention from educators, teachers, and pedagogical researchers. Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI), as a fast-evolving technology, would impact planning education and practice, and might change the way how assessment should be designed for planning students. The overall aim of this research is to provide a better understanding of how Generative AI change the way of designing authentic assessments and to provide prompts that enable further in-depth discussion and rethinking of how to adapt and appropriately use Generative AI in the design of authentic assessments in the subject area of Town and Regional Planning. A multi-methods approach combining literature analysis, questionnaire survey, and a focus group was adopted. The literature analysis provided an overall understanding of the research context about how various subject areas treat Generative AI in higher education. A questionnaire survey in a planning society, managed by the Planning discipline at the University of Liverpool, consists of educators, practitioners, and students, and the focus group involving frontline planning educators were conducted. The study collected experience, opinions and thoughts in real-world teaching, learning, and practice, which provided a better understanding of how Generative AI, as a newly emerging, fast-involving, and disruptive technological tool will affect planning education and the requirements of knowledge and skills in the contemporary planning industry, and how the industry should adapt to the transition.

Planning education is under sustained pressure to respond rapidly to iterative policy reform, technological change, and spatial and climate crises. This has oriented planning curricula toward responsiveness, and continual updating- qualities with genuine professional value, but which risk narrowing planning's intellectual project to adaptive problem-solving.
This paper argues that planning education is a key institutional arena in which the epistemic and temporal foundations of the discipline are reproduced, and renewed- and that the temporal assumptions embedded in curriculum design and content choices deserve explicit critical scrutiny.
Drawing on curriculum organisation, pedagogical practice, and patterns in postgraduate dissertation topics across Jordanian (Al Khalidi et al., 2022) and UK institutions, the paper identifies a shared but differently constituted conditions of temporal misalignment: a gap between what curricula position students to know and the planning challenges they will encounter. While the nature of this misalignment differs across contexts- shaped by the distinct pressures, resources, and contingencies that planning as both a profession and a pedagogical practice faces- in both cases it narrows the space for normative judgement and contested expertise.
Building on social theories of temporality (Adam & Groves, 2007; ), and critical account of knowledge formation in higher education (Clegg, 2010) and current debates on planning temporal’s governance (Dobson & Parker, 2024), the paper advances temporal reflexivity as a pedagogical project to recognise competing temporalities in planning knowledge, make deliberate space for critical reasoning under conditions of systemic change, and work through uncertainty without premature closure.

Creative round table as a zine-making workshop. Discussions whilst making and doing. Participants will be invited to have an imaginative response to the conference theme: Building Planning Up. This could be by creating a zine about your research or teaching.

A zine is a short magazine that often has a political or personal message. They can be made in a variety of ways and can include text, poetry, images and especially collage. Zine making is used as a research method, community participation technique, and as a teaching tool. They can even be module assignments. There is huge potential to use this across planning.

Explore the conference theme or use this creative space to reflect on a hot topic in planning or even to explain your own research paper in a different way. Instructions will be given and materials provided. There will also be examples, including those from research projects. No prior experience or artistic talent required. Making a zine is about exploring ideas and communicating messages.