The climate transition poses major challenges for urban areas, which make a considerable contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and are often poorly adapted to climate change. Concepts such as urban sustainability, climate urbanism, and urban climate governance are urban climate discourses that adapt the broader climate transition to the urban scale and can be grouped under the Urban Climate Transition (UCT) discourse. Our research asks whether and how the UCT discourse is institutionalised into urban policy and practice. This question is crucial because it is at the urban scale that the climate transition discourse manifests materially through policies on planning, transport and energy, inter alia. Approaches to understanding the institutionalisation of ideas, narratives, imaginaries, and discourses have recently gained traction in urban planning. Cultural Political Economy is one such approach that is concerned with the relationship between semiotic (imaginaries, discourses) and extra-semiotic (material) factors. This research stems from the Urban Retrofit project which investigates place-based adaptations to the built environment through planning and development systems. Within this project we mapped governance structures and policy processes for five secondary UK cities, setting out how the urban climate transition features, and supplemented this with 21 interviews with key policy actors. Our analysis identified factors enabling and constraining the institutionalisation of the urban climate transition along lines of enquiry drawn from Cultural Political Economy that encompass the coherence of the UCT as an imaginary, its interaction with rival imaginaries such as housing development, and material factors such as governance organisation and funding mechanisms.

Globally agricultural policies addressing the biodiversity and climate crises are increasingly characterised by diversified funding landscapes that combine public and private models. Existing research examines policy through individual agri-environment schemes with limited understanding of how agricultural transitions are enacted across multiple funding mechanisms and the work required to navigate and sustain engagement. This paper addresses this gap by examining how diversified agri-environmental funding systems are made workable in practice, providing one of the first integrated and in-depth analyses of England’s post-Brexit agri-environmental funding landscape and, in doing so, providing insights into the potential interactions with the statutory planning system in the delivery of nature recovery.

Drawing on a systematic funding matrix, consultation reports, and 14 interviews with farmers and land managers, the study documents the scale and diversity of emerging agri-environmental funding arrangements, showing how the resulting governance complexity is experienced and managed in everyday decision-making. The analysis shows that diversification intensifies and redistributes labour, much of which remains unrecognised and under-resourced. This ‘hidden work’ has implications for equity, participation, and the sustainability of transitions with transferability to a range of global policy areas and implications for the overlap with planning for nature recovery.

By reframing the work of agri-environmental transition, this paper makes a substantive contribution to applied environmental management. The framework developed offers transferable insights for international policymakers and practitioners designing agri-environmental interventions in other contexts characterised by funding diversification and institutional complexity.

The risks of coastal erosion and flooding are increasing across the UK, yet coastal management approaches remain fragmented and differentiated, with varying legislation, institutional responsibilities and resource limitations creating significant challenges for planning within coastal authorities. In Northern Ireland, the absence of a formalised coastal management framework leaves councils without a clear policy basis for proactive adaptation, creating uncertainty within planning processes. In England, Shoreline Management Plans offer a framework for adaptation, but their integration within spatial planning is inconsistent. Funding for managing coastal risk across the UK is uncertain. Together, these uncertainties create challenges for planners to balance development pressures and socio-economic objectives with longer-term adaptation to coastal change and flooding.

This paper presents findings from a comparative project examining how planners in England and Northern Ireland interpret and manage these uncertainties, drawing on insights from participatory workshops with local authority planners, policymakers and coastal practitioners. The research illustrates the type of uncertainty planners and coastal managers encounter, and reflects upon the institutional and policy conditions that shape their work. In particular, the challenges of balancing longer-term adaptation to coastal risk, with more immediate pressures of meeting housing need and tackling socio-economic challenges. The paper reflects upon how coastal management frameworks shape decision-making, and identifies opportunities and recommendations for more effective responses to the increasing risks of coastal flooding and erosion.

Ireland's population is ageing at more than twice the EU average rate, yet over 80% of older adults live in privately-owned homes that public policy has largely failed to address. This paper presents findings from an MPhil research study examining how older homeowners in suburban Dublin can be empowered to adapt and re-use their existing homes — to metamorphose them — to meet their evolving needs, in line with Ireland's stated ageing-in-place policy.

Central to the paper is an evaluation of the Ava Housing model, a pilot scheme supported under Ireland's Housing for All strategy for innovative housing redesign for older persons. The Ava model reconfigures family-sized, suburban homes so that the homeowner relocates to a self-contained ground-floor living unit while creating a rental unit on the upper floor. This "downsizing-in-situ" approach enables older homeowners to remain in their home and community, reduce maintenance burdens, generate rental income, and gain companionship — without displacement.

Drawing on mixed-methods research including cross-sectoral policy analysis and semi-structured interviews with older homeowners — including a participant in the Ava pilot — the paper argues that Ireland's housing policy remains constrained by a "right-sizing" narrative that ignores the deep emotional, financial, and place-based attachments of older persons to their homes. Structural barriers including fragmented grant eligibility, absent financing mechanisms, and inadequate advisory support undermine agency, particularly for low-income homeowners.

The paper's contribution is to demonstrate how a replicable, scalable adaptation model, grounded in lived experience, can reframe planning and housing policy debates — moving from passive care narratives towards enabling genuine choice and dignity in later life.

Neighbourhood environments play an important role in shaping health, wellbeing, and opportunities for social connection in later life. A key challenge for policymakers, planners, and service providers is designing age-friendly environments that respond to older people’s diverse social and mobility needs, while recognising the health and spatial inequalities that make participation easier for some groups than others. Although planning has an important role to play in supporting ageing well in place, policy frameworks often rely on standardised indicators and age-friendly checklists that can overlook the uneven, lived geographies of later life.

This paper presents findings from ENOLA (Enhancing Neighbourhood Environments for Older Adult Social Connectedness), a UK-based research project funded by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and undertaken in collaboration with Re-engage, a charity working to reduce social isolation among older people. The study combined creative, qualitative and spatial methods, including interviews, social world mapping, and go-along interviews, to explore how older adults experience and navigate their local neighbourhoods.

Findings are presented through a series of spatial stories that overlay participants’ existing and ideal social worlds, revealing how everyday environmental conditions enable or constrain opportunities for social connection. The analysis highlights the relational and emotional dimensions of place that are often absent from conventional planning evidence. The paper argues that spatial storytelling offers a valuable approach for incorporating lived experience into planning for ageing, moving beyond deficit-based narratives and supporting more responsive, place-based interventions to reduce inequalities and enhance social connectedness in later life.

Place-based knowledge, which is rooted in informal spaces and their users’ experiences, is essential for co-envisioning planning alternatives and translating them into action beyond formal planning systems. This paper examines the Saving Pang Jai Campaign, a self-mobilised, community-led initiative in mid-2010s Hong Kong that sought to preserve and reimagine the Yen Chow Street Temporary Hawker Bazaar (Pang Jai), a 44-year-old fabric market facing demolition for public housing. The case turns on two competing ways of knowing the same place. To the government, Pang Jai was a public space temporarily designated for a hawker bazaar, subject to the state’s overriding right to resume the land for redevelopment without acknowledging the place-based values; to its hawkers, users and the wider community, Pang Jai was a lived ‘community commons’ where decades of hawking had built social capital and linked fabric industries to the neighbourhood. Through participatory workshops, advocacy and hawkers’ attempts, hawkers — many unlicensed and excluded from formal decision-making — empowered themselves with the community to co-develop an alternative vision for the bazaar as a commons, which also became an ‘intellectual commons’ within the hawker community and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Drawing on interviews in 2019 and 2025 and ongoing observations, this paper argues that community-led planning enabled hawkers to assert their rights through place-based knowledge and to shape community-apsired planning futures beyond government-defined planning frameworks and decisions. Although the market was forcibly relocated in January 2023 and some elements of the community plan ‘tactically’ executed by the government, Pang Jai’s planning process shows how international cases can reshape what counts as legitimate planning knowledge — offering UK and Irish community-led planning an insurgent counterpart to statutory models and a way of seeing the ‘informal’ and ‘temporary’ spaces as a valuable resource that planners may overlook.

This research investigates the interplay between urban transformation and residential mobility in Shanghai, China, examining how patterns of residential mobility both reflect and shape the city’s evolving socio-spatial dynamics. It shows how shifts in housing reform, economic transformation, and urban regeneration have reconfigured residents’ movements, choices, and social positioning over time through interacting institutional and social logics. The research is grounded in an in-depth case study of Bugaoli, a historic longtang neighbourhood typified by dense, lane-style housing in Shanghai, to examine how residents’ life-course intersect with rapid urban change.

The research findings to be presented reveal in Bugaoli, for local residents, urban regeneration is not merely a physical improvement but an institutional reconfiguration that may alter their social positions and the distribution of urban resources. This perception leads residents worry that the benefits and resources originally theirs may, after urban regeneration, be taken over by more powerful or wealthier actors. Specifically, urban regeneration often only enhances the physical dimensions of communities, yet it struggles to inherit or substitute the emotional and cultural senses of belonging that residents cherish. For young residents, sufficiently high relocation compensation may serve as a pivotal opportunity for achieving class mobility. However, for elderly residents, departing from their original communities entails the loss of familiar social networks and life rhythms. Meanwhile, for lower income individuals, such compensation increasingly displaces them toward more distant suburbs. Consequently, demolition and compensation compel urban regeneration policies to confront multiple, mutually conflicting, household objectives during implementation. Therefore, the urban regeneration policies aim to improve the physical environment while preserving residents’ resources and social stability, but these goals often conflict, creating complex interest struggles and institutional challenges.

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is widely promoted as a strategy for sustainable urban development, particularly in rapidly urbanising regions of the Global South. As planning ideas increasingly circulate across national contexts, their implementation is shaped through processes of translation and adaptation within local institutional environments (McCann & Ward, 2012). However, despite strong policy support, TOD implementation frequently remains limited. This raises a critical question: what institutional barriers might be preventing implementation under uneven institutional conditions?

This paper conceptualises TOD not primarily as a technical or design challenge, but as a problem of institutional coordination. Drawing primarily on institutional capacity perspectives (Healey, 2002), while incorporating recent discussions on institutional mechanisms and governance arrangements (Sorensen, 2025), the paper examines how coordination processes shape planning implementation in complex metropolitan governance contexts.

Empirically, the paper investigates the Jakarta metropolitan area through a qualitative case study of the Jakarta metropolitan area Urban Transport Policy Integration Project Phase 3 (JUTPI3, 2022–2025). Using process tracing and participant’s observation, it analyses inter-ministerial negotiations, coordination attempts, and efforts to establish a Metropolitan Coordination Forum for TOD implementation.

The findings reveal that although coordination processes strengthened shared understanding and contributed to institutionalising a coordination forum, significant implementation barriers persisted, including ambiguous institutional responsibilities, fragmented funding arrangements, and uneven local institutional capacities.

The paper argues that implementation challenges may persist when asymmetries in authority, resources, and institutional capacity remain unresolved.

Financing and funding metro infrastructure remain persistent challenges for global cities. The Elizabeth line, formerly Crossrail, has been facing significant funding pressures, while its decade-long-standing former partner, MTR, has financed and funded Hong Kong’s metro expansion through an integrated rail-property model with limited subsidy. Why has that module not been translated to London over their partnership?

This study compares how London and Hong Kong capture land and property values around new metro lines and stations, and what these approaches mean for efficiency, equity, design outcomes, and long-term financial sustainability. Focusing on two major projects, the London Elizabeth Line and Hong Kong Tuen Ma Line, it examines how each city’s institutions, planning systems, and taxation arrangements shape value-capture mechanisms. Methodologically, the study combines document analysis of two decades of policy materials, project reports, and planning documents to provide a rigorous comparative assessment.

The study aims to map trade-offs between predictable, rules-based levies and flexible, negotiated development agreements; identify where value increases are missed, fragmented, or misallocated; and assess the role of station–land integration and non-fare revenues. By explaining why similar rail ambitions produce different funding and project outcomes, the findings contribute to more context-sensitive and financially sustainable strategies for metro infrastructure delivery worldwide.

Academic and professional integrity is being challenged like never before. In academia, ‘authenticity of authorship’ is under threat by generative artificial intelligence (gAI) (Nowak, 2026). gAI offers educational and professional benefits, including idea generation, drafting support, and assistance with repetitive tasks (Cotton, Cotton, and Shipway, 2024). However, gAI can also generate apparently ‘original’ content without requiring user comprehension or cognitive engagement (Rodrigues et al., 2024). It can also present fabricated, ‘hallucinated’, material as fact. Furthermore, use of gAI may be concealed behind a veneer of legitimacy, framed as supportive scaffolding. In academic assessments, as well as professional practice, it can potentially tempt, or seduce, people to engage in questionable practices that might not otherwise be pursued.

Despite policy and guidance in both academia and practice (see for example: UWE, 2023; RTPI, 2019; Planning Inspectorate, 2026) grey areas remain in the liminal space between acceptable-unacceptable practices—at what point does assistance become problematic by masking an absence of genuine learning? HE policies often defer definitive guidance to individual tutors, placing responsibility for definition, interpretation, enforcement, and investigation at the local level. There is limited research into tutor perceptions of how such boundaries are defined, communicated, and enacted (Corbin, 2025; Nowak, 2026).

My Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) research explores planning-related subject tutors’ perceptions of acceptability boundaries and seeks to establish improved academic/professional procedures and practice. I am a Senior Lecturer in Planning and chartered member of the RTPI.

Lessons from the first 2 years of the TU Dublin Built Environment Sustainability Hackathon.

The TU Dublin Built Environment Sustainability Hackathon is an annual event for senior students in development-related disciplines created to foster interdisciplinary communication and build student awareness and competency in team work. The presentation reflects on the imperfection of the approach, its barriers and the possibility for growth and expansion.

This presentation discusses potential shifts in planning education. In particular, it highlights the future role of planners in the location of Drug Consumption Rooms (DCRs). The United Kingdom’s experiment with DCRs raises an important question for planning education and professional practice: are future planners adequately equipped to deal with the “frontier politics”, stakeholder reactions, and community views toward DCRs? This presentation reveals this is not the case and suggests practical, structural changes to U.K. planning education to create a more socially inclusive planning imagination that engages effectively with illegal drugs and harm reduction interventions, and how the “illegal” should be planned for.

This paper explores the experience of local planning authorities in the north-west of England in bidding for and delivering place-based regeneration projects through the Levelling Up Fund (LUF) and subsequent grant funding initiatives. The LUF was awarded by the UK Government to local authorities on a competitive basis between 2021 and 2023, and while the national political and funding landscape has evolved since, the experience continues to impact upon local planning and regeneration practice. The research process included an initial roundtable event with local authority officers from across north-west England, followed by three in-depth case studies of LUF projects comprising site visits and interviews with officers from Manchester City Council, Wigan Council, and Lancaster City Council. Initial findings underline the inherent pressures of bidding for and delivering on competitive regeneration funding, not least mobilising resources, and reconciling proposals with existing local policy priorities and at times fluid national bidding parameters. The evidence also suggests that despite this, the re-emergence of more distinctly place-based regeneration programmes is rebuilding and reworking some of the local authority regeneration capacity and skills which had been diminished over nearly two decades of austerity. This includes the knowledge needed by contemporary planning and regeneration practitioners to navigate the entrepreneurial governance landscape through which place-based regeneration is being funded and steered by UK Government.

This paper examines how planning law and governance arrangements shape the spatial and social outcomes of urban transformation in Türkiye through the case of the Göztepe Risky Area in Bağcılar, Istanbul. Since the enactment of Law No. 6306 on the Transformation of Areas Under Disaster Risk, urban restructuring has increasingly been organised through legal categories such as risky buildings, risky areas, and reserve building areas. While these instruments have enabled stronger intervention in vulnerable urban areas, more importantly they have reorganised the scale, authority, and territorial logic through which planning decisions are produced and translated into statutory plans and implementation frameworks.

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, document-based case-study approach, combining the analysis of statutory and policy frameworks with the examination of planning and implementation documents prepared for the Göztepe Risky Area. The paper argues that parcel-based and structure-led redevelopment tends to produce fragmented spatial outcomes, including density increase, pressure on infrastructure, and limited capacity to provide public open space and social facilities in an integrated manner. By contrast, area-based and neighbourhood-scale planning offers a more comprehensive framework for coordinating implementation phasing, urban design, infrastructure provision, and the spatial organisation of public amenities.

The paper further argues that the social outcomes of area-based transformation should not be understood only through the conventional language of in-situ transformation. They should also be evaluated in relation to the forms of social restructuring generated by redevelopment itself. These include the risk of capital-led exclusion, differentiated capacities of existing residents to remain in or return to the transformed area, the demands of adapting to denser and more regulated collective housing environments, and the gradual weakening of close-knit neighbourhood relations as everyday social contact becomes less immediate and more formalised. In this sense, the paper conceptualises the ethics of scale as a planning problem, showing that the scale of intervention shapes not only urban form but also the conditions of collective urban life, socio-spatial justice, and the legitimacy of planning practice.

The paper contributes to debates on planning law, ethics, and governance by demonstrating that a just transformation process requires not only statutory authority and coordinated implementation, but also critical attention to how new spatial and institutional arrangements reorganise everyday life, neighbourhood relations, and the distribution of urban value.

What responsibilities does planning have when the sites it regulates are also places of historical trauma? Across Ireland, former sites of institutional confinement and abuse, including Mother and Baby Homes, Industrial Schools and Magdalene Laundries, are increasingly subject to redevelopment, regeneration and adaptive reuse. While significant attention has been paid to questions of historical accountability, memorialisation and survivor recognition, the role of planning in shaping the future of these sites remains under-examined. This research argues that planning is not a neutral regulatory process but an active participant in determining how difficult histories are remembered, contested and transformed. The research presents a conceptual framework organised around three interconnected themes: system, conflict and possibility. The first examines the planning system, including policy, governance and legislative frameworks, and their capacity to respond to sites associated with historical harm. The second explores conflicts that emerge between development pressures, heritage considerations, survivor perspectives and public memory. The third considers ethical and inclusive planning approaches that support recognition, participation and restorative outcomes. Situated within debates on planning ethics, collective memory and transitional justice, the research seeks to expand understandings of planning's role in post-institutional landscapes. In doing so, it contributes to emerging discussions on how planning theory and practice can engage with contested heritage and difficult pasts. The research argues that former sites of institutional abuse present an important opportunity to reconsider the responsibilities of planning in contexts where questions of memory, justice and redevelopment intersect.

Digital platforms are increasingly becoming the infrastructure for accessing urban services and spaces under platformised cities. However, how this infrastructure is built spatially, and for whom, remains underexplored in planning research. Drawing on platform urbanism (Barns 2020), code/space (Kitchin & Dodge 2011) and Lefebvre's theory of the production of space, this study theorises that platformised space are politically and economically produced rather than simply technologically given. Taking Zhengzhou, China as an empirical case, the research develops three arguments. Firstly, the embedding of platforms into urban space is shaped by both market and state strategy. As the roles of platforms and the state are spatially selective, it produces a stratified digital space. Besides, platforms have reshaped urban spatial form. Some physical spaces have shrunk, while platform-related spaces have expanded, ultimately reorganizing how urban space operates. These spatial changes are rooted in the spatial arrangement by the three forces: the state, capital, and platform companies. In addition, platforms have become a new spatial form and urban infrastructure. For digital planning, this reframes platform infrastructure as representations of space, foregrounding spatial justice and unequal digital accessibility. This research argues that platform urbanisation reshapes urban space by three parties, namely state policy, capital operations and digital platform companies, through representation, production, and infrastructural embedding. This analysis contributes an analytical framework for digital planning that moves beyond technology-neutral narratives and foregrounds the power relations and inequalities.

Urban Digital Twins (DTs) are gaining prominence for their transformative potential with the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI). However, literature on applied examples of transport DTs, especially for buses, remains limited. This study conducts a literature review and thirty-eight stakeholder interviews to map the landscape for AI-enabled, transport-focused DT development in Liverpool City Region in the UK and Busan in South Korea. It identifies key actors, their roles and responsibilities, the relationship among them as well as their motivations, priorities, and standards pursued regarding topics including big data, AI, modelling frameworks, governance, feasibility, and social equity. Based on the synthesis of cross-case findings, this paper proposes a transferable framework for guiding DT development for buses, multimodal transport and beyond, with examples of input data, DT modules, conditions needed and KPIs. Furthermore, it identifies six important considerations for DT implementation and presents practical case examples from Liverpool and Busan. First two points are on governance: fostering multi-stakeholder collaboration and funding; and pursuing DT initiatives at both national and local levels. Two other points are on data: standardising online data-sharing platform with privacy safeguards and data monetisation; and overcoming reliance on private data through data agreements and citizen participation. Final two points are on DT design: adopting modular DT solutions; and matching DT modules with appropriate level of AI-enabled dynamic simulation, visualisation and automation.

Participatory planning theory evolved across several decades through a wide body of often fragmented literature. Foundational traditions, such as Davidoff’s advocacy planning, Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, Forester’s communicative planning, Healey’s collaborative planning, and Innes and Booher’s collaborative rationality, provide distinct though often competing interpretations of what meaningful participation consists of and the conditions that are necessary to attain it. This fragmentation produces several structural challenges as Generative AI is increasingly grounded within participatory planning practice. In this context, the discipline lacks an integrated basis for evaluating its implications. Existing research on Generative AI focuses predominantly on technical capabilities, providing limited engagement with the normative positions of participatory planning, as well as insufficient attention to questions of legitimacy and power.

This research argues that the participatory traditions, taken collectively, contain the resources required to assess Generative AI, but only if they are synthesised rather than applied individually. Applying Jabareen's (2009) conceptual framework methodology, the paper derives five evaluative dimensions from undertaking a systematic comparison of the traditions: (1) Access and Representation, (2) Influence and Power, (3) Communication and Trust, (4) Deliberation and Inclusion, and (5) Legitimacy and Outcomes. Each dimension emerges from a pattern of convergence and divergence across the five traditions and generates a distinct set of evaluative questions for Generative AI tools in participatory planning. The framework is presented as a conceptual contribution in its own right, with empirical research identified as the next step to test and validate its dimensions.

This research examines how young single women in Taiwan face disadvantages in securing stable housing and how they are excluded from gender‑inclusive urban housing strategies. It investigates the mechanisms through which these disadvantages operate and why gender‑conscious housing practices and policies are urgently needed.

Rising housing prices have intensified barriers to independent household formation, and these affordability pressures intersect with gendered dimensions of housing inequality. Existing policy interventions, particularly the expansion of social housing, remain insufficient. They do not challenge cultural narratives that equate homeownership with adulthood and personal success, nor do they disrupt the broader commodification of housing within Taiwan’s market‑driven system. As a result, structural inequities persist, reinforcing gender‑based disparities in access to secure and affordable housing.

Although research shows that escalating housing costs disproportionately disadvantage young single women, explanations for these disparities remain limited, revealing a clear research gap that this study addresses.

A two‑stage hybrid methodology is employed. The first stage involves policy analysis of government documents and reports published between 2006 and 2026 to identify how high housing prices, entrenched family norms, and cultural expectations surrounding homeownership interact to shape unequal outcomes. The second stage applies econometric analysis to examine the relationship between female homeownership and housing inequality. Regression models will draw on data from the Department of Housing Registration, the Survey Research Data Archive, and the Directorate‑General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics in Taiwan, with SPSS used to test the robustness of the proposed hypothesis.

The draft December 2025 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) consultation was notably silent on gender, particularly regarding safety (Edgar, 2026). However, in January 2026, some reference to women and girls appears in the draft Planning Practice Guidance consultation document on design. This sparked a debate in the House of Commons on planning's role (Lewis & Keating, 2026) as well as discussions across the built environment industry (Williams, 2026). This paper explores this, and what the exclusion and lack of systematic approaches reveal about the institutionalisation of gender in planning systems in England. Using a comparative analysis of equivalent national planning policy and guidance to examine the wider UK and the Republic of Ireland, it explores why gender remains marginalised and what this lack of consideration means for the future of gender informed planning practice across these nations. Finally, through this analysis, it delves into the potential impact of gender-informed planning in improving the built environment for everyone.

The Garden City Movement and New Towns programme were both influenced by the British utopian tradition and aimed to create self-sufficient new communities that enabled all residents to thrive (Lock and Ellis, 2020). While New Towns have received significant academic attention, there has been more limited engagement with the queer communities’ experiences of these planned communities. Research on Scottish New Towns found mentions of ‘alternative sexualities’ were rare (Fair et al, 2025). Yet, recent publications from Storm & Goss (2025) and Grindrod (2026) have shed light on queer experiences of New Towns, with a particular focus on Milton Keynes.

This PhD study seeks to further contribute to this gap in knowledge by focusing on three research objectives:

• RO1: Reveal how societal norms, such as heteronormativity and patriarchy, have influenced the development of new communities.
• RO2: Explore the queer communities’ experience of everyday life in the post-war new towns, utilising a case study approach.
• RO3: Imagine how future generations of new communities can be planned, built and stewarded to act as sites of inclusive and prefigurative planning.

To achieve this, a multi-method approach will be adopted. This includes walking interviews (RO2) and participatory mapping with queer residents (RO3), supplemented by interviews with planning professionals (RO1/3) and archival research (RO1/2). This methodological approach seeks to examine how social norms shape the development of new communities, while also exploring how the experiences and desires of queer residents can be incorporated into the planning of future iterations of new towns.

Hong Kong’s Rail-plus-Property (R+P) model, in which the rail operator and developers jointly deliver high-rise leasehold flat units above railway stations/depots, has been praised as a self-financing best practice model of transit-oriented development and land values capture in East Asia and globally. Drawing on case studies of large-scale R+P developments in Hong Kong, this paper examines how Deeds of Mutual Covenant, the uneven allocation of undivided shares, and developer-appointed estate management enable developers to retain long-term control over maintenance, governance and redevelopment decisions after residents purchase their flats. The paper conceptualises this arrangement as a “spatio-legal contract”: a spatialised form of property hegemony embedded within Hong Kong's leasehold land-property system.
Based on fieldwork conducted in 2023–2024, prior to the 2025 Wang Fuk Court fire (“Hong Kong’s Grenfell Tower Fire”), the study shows how these arrangements constrain owners' ability to govern their own buildings. Residents describe a loss of security and control within homes they legally own, producing experiences of un-homing and “emplaced displacement” driven not by eviction but by compulsory large-scale maintenance, opaque governance structures and growing awareness of developer hegemony. Interestingly, flats under R+P are aspired by general Hong Kongers. Beyond Hong Kong, the paper contributes to debates on leasehold and commonhold reform in the UK, highlighting how the travelling Rail-plus-Property Model that uses land and property to subsidise property developments may generate future vulnerabilities for small owners from proper control over housing governance and the need to rethink what counts as just ‘best practice’.

This research examines how TOD, as globally circulating planning concept, is mobilised, translated and adapted in Malaysia and Wales. It explores how explicit of TOD in Malaysia and more implicit TOD aligned approaches in Wales. Guided by an ordinary cities perspective and policy mobility frameworks, the study traces how TOD concept travels and is reshaped through institutional, political and transport-planning processes. The research employs a comparative qualitative design combining document analysis with semi-structured interviews involving planners, transport authorities, regional agencies, developers, academics and community actors. Data were analysed through a thematic approach to compare policy actors’ interpretations of TOD, the framing of “best practice”, the institutional and political constraints in shaping translation into practice across the two settings.

Finding reveals contrasting translations of TOD. In Malaysia, TOD is explicitly embedded in within planning frameworks, rail-based development strategies and density incentives. Policy actors often frame TOD through development narratives emphasising intensification and coordinated delivery. However, policy visibility does not necessarily produce mobility alignment as affordability challenges, parking provision, car dependency and first and last mile connectivity continue to shape outcomes. In Wales, TOD is less frequently named, yet TOD aligned principles circulate through Metro investment, active travel, placemaking and regional initiatives. Here, the challenges lies less in policy absence than in coordinating connectivity and development objectives.

The analysis suggest that TOD can move beyond label, not as a fixed model, but as a policy idea reassemble through governance, actors and local mobility systems.

In a rapidly expanding megacity, macro-scale mobility data often overlook the everyday experiences of peripheral residents who regularly commute long distances to the city centre. While the peripheral area offers more housing alternatives, the physical and psychological burdens of long commute present significant challenges to commuters wellbeing. This research evaluates these dynamics by investigating how daily commuting behaviours and experiences influence the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of public transport users within Greater Jakarta, Indonesia.

Integrating quantitative survey data with in-depth qualitative insights, this study uncovers a spatial paradox. Quantitatively, a hierarchical OLS regression analysis (N = 424) demonstrates that for public transport users, objective structural factors, such as commuting duration and frequency, show an insignificant correlation with life satisfaction. Instead, emotional attachment to the home municipality emerges as the strongest positive predictor of wellbeing, outweighing the physical exhaustion of long commute and functioning as a "Sanctuary Effect".

Qualitatively, semi-structured interviews and travel diaries further explain these statistical findings by revealing how public transport commuters navigate their journeys, spatially and emotionally. Interviews show that participants willingly accept long commutes as a calculated and rational trade-off due to peripheral housing affordability and family stability. Furthermore, travel diaries capture distinct emotional shifts, where commuters experience peak stress during transit overcrowding, followed by a sense of relief and comfort when approaching their home destination. By focusing on the lived experiences of daily commutes, this study provides a clearer picture of how long commutes from peripheral residential areas shape commuters SWB.

Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) are an emerging mechanism for coordinating place‑based energy transitions, yet little is known about how these plans are produced, interpreted, and translated across the diverse actors involved in their development. This research examines the socio‑technical processes through which LAEPs take shape, focusing on how documents, practices, and organisational relationships influence their evolution.

The study adopts a qualitative approach informed by actor‑network theory, combining documentary analysis, semi‑structured interviews and case studies. Documentary analysis is used as a form of translation tracing, following how planning artefacts move between organisations and how meaning is negotiated. Thematic analysis provides a flexible framework for identifying patterns across both documentary and interview data. Case studies are used to investigate the longitudinal effect of LAEP in specific technological cases.

Preliminary findings indicate that LAEPs have had relatively low influence, with the majority of local authorities in Wales accepting them, but agreeing that it is to be used by regional or national levels of authority. Early themes highlight tensions between strategic ambition and operational constraints, the stabilising role of technical modelling outputs, and the ways in which organisational priorities shape what becomes “actionable” within the plan.

By illuminating the contingent and negotiated nature of LAEP development, the research contributes to wider debates on socio‑technical transitions and the governance of local energy systems. The final thesis will offer methodological insights into translation‑focused document analysis and practical implications for improving the robustness and legitimacy of LAEP processes.

Reducing land take, set out in the EU's target of no net land take by 2050, and steering cities toward more compact, low-carbon forms are central objectives of the European green transition. These goals rest on a long-standing planning assumption: that as demographic and economic pressures stabilise, the need for urban expansion eases, opening scope for densification, consolidation, and reuse. This paper revisits that assumption through an analysis of urban expansion across European Functional Urban Areas over the past two decades.

The evidence suggests the relationship between urban expansion and its conventional drivers has weakened, with land take continuing across a wide range of demographic and economic contexts rather than tracking them closely. This raises the possibility that contemporary expansion is shaped less by current demand than by inherited development trajectories and structural momentum - dynamics that sit awkwardly with land-take reduction and compact-city agendas.

We argue this points to a blind spot in green-transition planning: instruments calibrated to demographic signals and visible growth pressure may systematically overlook expansion that persists on its own momentum, across both growing and declining cities. Reframing land-take governance as a question of trajectory and lock-in, rather than demand management, offers planning a more robust basis for aligning urban form with environmental objectives. The paper reflects on what this shift implies for how planning knowledge about urban growth is constructed, and for the spatial dimension of climate planning.

In the UK, a large proportion of future emissions are embedded in existing cities, given that more than 80% of buildings that will be occupied by 2050 have been built. This suggests that a critical part of the low-carbon transition shall address existing urban systems and actually existing unsustainability.

Yet research shows low-carbon transition has been slow, fragmented and controversial – often framed as an ‘implementation gap’. We argue that it reflects a deeper disjunct: the planning and development systems that produced carbon-intensive urban environments remain organised around land release and new development rather than repairing and adapting existing built environments. Furthermore, despite strong policy ambitions and broader agreement on characteristics of sustainable cities, there remains considerable uncertainty about how sustainable futures can be achieved in practice.

In response, we propose urban retrofit as a way to capture the problem space around the disjunct. It helps us to understand the climate politics of the ‘existing city’ in two ways. First, it shifts attention from future sustainable visions to actually existing unsustainability embedded in inherited urban systems. Second, it shifts attention from new development and climate projects to the urban processes through which carbon-intensive environments are continually (re)produced through the planning and development systems. Urban retrofit foregrounds a politics around urban repair, reframing low-carbon transition as a challenge of reworking the existing city both materially and institutionally.

The paper concludes by outlining five approaches to urban retrofit, demonstrating a heterogenous and contested field through which different actors pursue different low-carbon futures.

Universities are anchor institutions, nurturing knowledge and innovation ecosystems within their regions. University campuses can be understood as complex urban realms where spatial planning, governance and everyday practices converge. Within this context, living labs provide a mechanism for building collaborations among stakeholders and enabling real-world experimentation across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. Grounded in the quadruple helix, living labs align with the fourth-generation university, which emphasises societal transformation, place-based innovation and cross-sector partnerships.

This paper draws on two datasets:(1) a series of workshops conducted with 28 members of staff at Cardiff University to investigate drivers and barriers to embedding living labs in research culture (2) case studies drawing on first-hand experiences of initiating and sustaining living labs at Cardiff University as part of education (design studios in planning and architecture), and business operations (the Ecosystem Resilience and Biodiversity Action Plan (ERBAP) to enhance campus biodiversity, and the Anti-Racist Living Lab to embed inclusivity). The findings from the above datasets illustrate the potential of living labs as a form of experiential and interdisciplinary learning for everyone involved, and the challenges around funding, timescales and creating shared understanding of living labs. Most importantly, living labs offer a renewed sense of agency for staff, students, and external partners to actively learn together for urban change. We argue that living labs function as a transformative pedagogical framework of social learning, fostering collaboration and real-world engagement, while requiring deeper embedding within institutional structures and cultures to realise their potential for systemic change.

This paper explores the scope for innovative planning pedagogies in a time of increasing awareness about the need for co-creation in planning practices and in generating planning knowledge. It draws on the example of a public consultation event devised by masters planning students, teaching staff and city council planning staff. The consultation related to a proposed urban regeneration plan beside the location of two secondary schools. Although wide-ranging public consultation had taken place, the voices of the secondary school pupils had not been forthcoming. The consultation project with masters’ students was designed as a combination of consultation and collaboration involving the masters’ students and secondary school pupils in critiquing the existing regeneration proposals, and examining potential alternative visions for the area in question. A key element of the exercise was the masters’ students seeking structured feedback from the secondary school pupils on whether and how the engagement process had made a difference for them, and the value of the subsequent reflective process for the masters students that it gave rise to.

The paper highlights the value of experiential learning in a real-world context, where planning students are involved in real planning projects alongside professional planners. It discusses the value of structured forms of feedback and reflection on the process, in this case, through seeking feedback on the quality of the public engagement process. It also discusses the use of a skills framework that supports teaching staff and students to assess students’ progress in reaching a range of essential planning competencies as part of their professional development as planners.

As the UK planning system shifts towards statutory climate mandates—including mandatory biodiversity net gain, nutrient neutrality, and low-carbon building metrics—the role of the planning practitioner has fundamentally transformed. Planners are increasingly required to act as technical orchestrators of complex socio-ecological systems. However, a systemic gap remains between rapidly evolving statutory expectations and the traditional competencies embedded within professional planning education. This paper addresses this deficit by exploring how higher education institutions can re-engineer postgraduate curricula to build resilient, future-proof professional capacity.

Drawing on the pedagogical framework of the Urban Planning and Resilience postgraduate program at the University of Kent, this study evaluates curriculum strategies that bridge the gap between spatial planning theory, urban morphology, and nature-based solutions. It critiques traditional, siloed teaching models and proposes an integrated framework. This approach blends macro-level global planning case studies with localised technical workshops focusing on microclimatic impacts, statutory legislative contexts, and environmental sustainability standards.

The paper argues that tackling the UK’s planning capacity crisis requires more than increasing graduate numbers; it demands a fundamental shift in the technical, systemic, and ecological literacy of those graduates. By aligning academic training with the cross-cutting demands of modern green infrastructure delivery, higher education can empower the next generation of planners to lead on climate adaptation. Ultimately, this study directly addresses the conference theme 'Building Planning Up' by positioning progressive pedagogy as the structural foundation for resilient planning practice.

'Community' is a widely used concept within planning, yet the meaning of this word is often unclear and can shift depending on context. This paper presents interim findings from an ongoing RTPI-funded research project exploring how ‘community’ is understood and worked with across different areas of planning practice, and how this shapes both processes and outcomes.

The research draws on the PORTAL framework, developed through earlier work on community-led housing, which understands community as a multi-dimensional spectrum, including physical, organisational, relational, transformational, aspirational and liminal aspects. This project focuses on translating that framework into use within planning, working alongside planners, built environment professionals and community participants to explore how it holds up in practice and where it could prove especially useful.

The paper reports on a series of interviews and a participatory workshop where PORTAL was applied to real planning scenarios. Early findings suggest that the framework helps to make different understandings of community more visible across various planning activities and processes, offering a shared language that can support conversations between professional roles and with communities. It also highlights aspects of community that are present in lived experience but less easily captured within formal processes, prompting reflection on how these might be more fully acknowledged in practice.

Building on this, the research is developing a modular toolkit to support use in practice, combining diagnostics, prompts, facilitation approaches and practical guidance. The next phase will test these tools within live planning contexts in the South West.

In the context of electrical energy demand doubling by 2050, this paper considers the public and social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructure (Batel et al., 2013; Zaharuddin et al., 2025). The focus is on largely urban settlements framed as “left behind”, meaning where knowledge and agency are shaped by people’s attachment to places (Pike et al., 2024). Whilst such places lose out to the economic growth model centred on cities, I argue that their history of industrial infrastructure and related employment may be suited to new transmission, supply plants and storage than more rural settings.

The case is framed historically. Sparsely population areas of north of Scotland pioneered hydro energy in the 1940s and more latterly have contributed hugely to wind energy. However, they have relied on extensive transmission infrastructure. More recent planning hurdles have led developers to complex solutions such as undersea cabling. In comparison, politicians in post-industrial settings look to more emotive messages to harness the local potential of renewable. For example, a Mersey Tidal scheme is framed as providing thousands of jobs and powering every home in Liverpool City Region.

Methodologically, this paper discusses participatory online spaces (Radtke and Bohn, 2026) to help stakeholders to grasp the joins and ruptures in planning systems and related data. The latter is illustrated by a series of workshops and short film led by the author in 2025 to visualise energy supply futures in the Wales and the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan.

(references available as requested)

Environmental planning systems have traditionally treated technically contentious publics as obstacles to consensus-building and efficient decision-making. Yet communities living alongside environmentally controversial developments increasingly challenge not only the social legitimacy of planning decisions, but also the scientific assumptions underpinning Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) processes themselves. Drawing upon literature from planning theory, environmental justice, science and technology studies, and citizen science, this paper argues that planners should engage more rather than less with such “awkward” publics. In particular, the paper advances the concept of the “community scientist”: locally embedded citizens, campaign groups and non-governmental organisations who gather, interpret and mobilise environmental data from the bottom up, often in collaboration with universities or independent experts. This paper argues that these actors represent an important form of situated and experiential expertise that conventional technocratic planning systems frequently marginalise. Rather than viewing contentious participation as irrational, disruptive or anti-scientific, planners should recognise community science as a potentially valuable form of co-produced environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to air pollution, cumulative impacts and lived environmental risk. The paper further suggests that greater engagement with community scientists reconnects contemporary planning practice with earlier civic planning traditions associated with Patrick Geddes and the principle of “survey before plan”. Ultimately, the paper contends that the future legitimacy of environmental planning may depend upon planners becoming more willing to work with technically informed dissent rather than attempting to neutralise it.

Digbeth, Birmingham, is undergoing rapid transformation. The arrival of the BBC at Typhoo Wharf, major housing and infrastructure investment, and the designation of a Digbeth Growth Zone have brought significant resources and attention to an area whose cultural identity was built not by institutions but by artists, makers, social enterprises and informal networks operating at low cost over decades. This paper asks a pointed question: when cultural communities are recognised as assets within regeneration narratives, does that recognition translate into meaningful influence over the decisions that shape their future?

Drawing on co-creative research undertaken as part of the AHRC Creative Communities Community Innovation Practitioner programme at City-REDI, University of Birmingham, the paper presents empirical evidence from 25 stakeholder interviews, four participatory workshops and walking conversations with cultural practitioners, planners, policymakers and grassroots organisations across 2025–26. It examines the gap between stated commitments to community participation and the practical governance mechanisms — planning obligations, affordable workspace policy, local plan provisions, anchor institution behaviour — that determine whether creative communities stay or are displaced.

The paper argues that participation in regeneration remains largely consultative rather than constitutive. It identifies the conditions under which cultural knowledge moves from being heard to being treated as evidence in planning and investment decisions, and offers transferable lessons for devolved urban governance in the West Midlands and beyond.

Across the UK and Ireland, housing delivery depends overwhelmingly on private developers operating within market-led planning systems. Local authority planners carry substantial responsibility for housing outcomes, yet they lack direct control over the actors who determine whether homes get built. Working without formal authority over developers, planners pursue housing delivery through influence, negotiation, and steering. They steer developer behaviour, build and sustain political support for contentious decisions, and compete for organisational resources under conditions of persistent constraint. Remarkably little is known about how planners actively address these challenges in practice.

This research, funded by the RTPI Early Career Research Grant, investigates how local authority planners pursue delivery enhancement under these conditions. Three research questions structure the inquiry: What challenges arise in working to enhance housing delivery? How do planners initiate policy responses? How is implementation managed when it depends on private developers?

The study examines two suburban London boroughs, tracking each case from 2017 to the present. Waltham Forest represents incremental, officer-led reform within existing planning structures. Barking and Dagenham represents radical, councillor-led reform involving major restructuring of planning services. The longitudinal design generates contrasting explanatory accounts of the possibilities planners generated under conditions of institutional change and political leadership. The study applies Design Recovery in Cases, an instrumental case study method developed from new mechanistic philosophy and pragmatist thinking, to recover how delivery enhancement worked across these cases and generate transferable understanding of how planners can steer, rather than control, the actors on whom delivery depends.

Planning is increasingly used as a tool for delivering or incentivising growth. Yet, there is increasingly an acknowledgement that growth needs to be inclusive and provide environmental and social benefits. The London Plan (2021) has an overarching objective to deliver ‘good growth’. At the same time, since the first London Plan in 2004, the intention has been for the identification of Opportunity Areas (OAs) to be the primary way to deliver growth (of homes and employment). Despite the expansion of the Opportunity Area designations, from 28 in 2004 to 48 in 2021 (Ferm et al, 2022), little attention has been given to measuring, documenting or monitoring growth in these areas or to understanding what the outcomes are and whether ‘good growth’ is being achieved.

In this paper, we examine the localised outcomes of the Opportunity Area policy in three case study areas – chosen to represent significant groupings of OAs established by metropolitan-level analysis. Through a multi-method approach including (a) spatial mapping of new homes, jobs, public spaces and social infrastructure; (b) desktop analysis of social, economic and demographic trends; and (c) qualitative site observations, the paper investigates Opportunity Area outcomes against three Good Growth principles in the London Plan: (1) Building Strong and Inclusive Communities; (2) Delivering the Homes that London Needs; and (3) Growing a Good Economy. We find there is significant diversity in outcomes across the three OAs, challenging the conception of how to deliver Good Growth in different places.

There is a persistent housing crisis in England which is however paired with strong resistance to development, particularly in the greenbelt. Densification seems to be the logical answer, but according to policy think tanks with limited uptake outside city centres. Based on a three-year research project, this paper sheds light on a decade of suburban densification in England looking a detailed spatial data, policy documents and interviews with key actors. The findings of the project show the varied nature of suburban densification, showing that densification is taking place on a larger scale than postulated. It provides insights in the different types of densification looking at processes and outcomes and their respective geographies. The research then looks at the role of planners and the planning system, concluding that densification seems to be happening mostly under the radar. Planning policy for suburban areas is mostly passive, which has implications for the design quality of suburban densification.

The regeneration of brownfield land has been a key concern for planning and regeneration since the 1980s, after post-industrial decline in many countries led to the emergence of brownfield sites – technically described in England as previously developed land.

This proposed paper aims to explore the extent to which the focus of regeneration policy in England has shifted over recent decades, from soft end-use brownfield regeneration contributing to green infrastructure development, to hard end-use regeneration particularly focused on housing development.

To do this, the paper compares national and local policies comparing approaches in the 1990s to current policies. The paper also compares how brownfield registers have changed over the years, and which sites/areas get registered as brownfield sites. This compares the approaches of the early derelict land surveys, the National Land Use Database for Previously Developed Land (NLUD-PDL) and the more recent post-2017 brownfield registers maintained by local authorities.

In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing academic and policy debates about key spatial development paradigms and strategies. Should planning policy focus on dense compact (re)development, limiting urban expansion while providing space for more housing and employment uses? Or can brownfield regeneration also allow green infrastructure development, while accepting this may mean further urban expansion?

Each year at the Planning Research Conference, the RTPI hosts a roundtable in which researchers from across the UK and Ireland reflect on key trends and trajectories in planning reform. We draw out emerging research questions, themes, and trends, and focus on issues which may have slipped under scholars’ radar.

The panel returns this year following a spasm of legislative reform in England which will bring profound changes - both centralising and devolving decision making power in different ways. The planning minister has declared that the Government’s attention is now focused ‘very firmly towards ensuring the new system delivers’ and on ‘removing grit…’.

There’s a similar focus on embedding change across the UK and Ireland. The Planning (Wales) Act 2026 received Royal Assent in April, and the Planning Improvement Agenda in Northern Ireland continues its rollout. Meanwhile, the Scottish government has recently consulted on a range of measures related to housing and infrastructure delivery. In Ireland, changes underpinned by the Planning and Development Act 2024 and recent ministerial interventions continue to reshape the system.

But is flux set to be a consistent theme? Is irony? Failures to address the structural constraints that have prevented governments from meeting their own housing targets are leading them to increasingly intense rounds of planning reforms in search of ‘fixes’. Meanwhile, across the UK, recent election results could be a sign of political change that embeds structural challenges and brings more policy churn.

The gap between research and practice is extensively discussed within academic scholarship, both within planning (Dias and Oliviera 2025, Eizenberg et al 2025), and more widely (Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006). The two communities are frequently highlighted as ‘others’, occupying separate or parallel worlds (Newman et al 2015, Goodman et al 2022).

At the same time, growing interest in co-production and engaged scholarship seeks to bridge this divide through collaborative forms of knowledge production. Yet there remains limited empirical evidence of how practitioners experience participation in live research projects and what value such engagement creates for practitioners.

This paper draws on the Urban Retrofit project, a three-year UK-based research collaboration involving universities and public, private and third-sector partners exploring retrofit as a pathway towards more sustainable urban development. Using qualitative interviews with local authority practitioners participating in project activities, including an international study tour and research symposium, the paper examines engagement in research as a form of reflective practice.

Findings suggest that the value of research engagement extends beyond the production of evidence or research outputs. Practitioners describe participation as creating space for reflection, providing reassurance through comparative learning, fostering mutual learning between researchers and practitioners, and building relationships that support ongoing knowledge exchange. The paper argues that research-practice collaboration should be understood not only as a mechanism for knowledge transfer, but also as a social process that shapes professional thinking and practice in real time.

Drawing from findings from the Just Neighbourhoods? research, the paper examines how one former mining neighbourhood in Doncaster utilised neighbourhood planning as a mechanism to negotiate experiences of everyday local injustice and shape future development. The relationship between participation, power and influence within community-led planning activity in a neighbourhood experiencing long-term deprivation and industrial decline is explored to reveal a neighbourhood far from disengaged. Residents mobilised around a strong sense of identity, heritage and concern for quality of life. They produced an ambitious neighbourhood plan centring on environmental restoration, heritage protection and the creation of a country park around the town’s historic mining headstocks. The process generated high levels of participation and contributed towards attracting wider regeneration investment through the Towns Fund. Yet, despite extensive local involvement and the formal status of neighbourhood planning, participants repeatedly described feeling that key decisions continued to be shaped elsewhere. Drawing on literatures of social justice, participation and relational power, the paper argues that the case exposes a persistent gap between participation and influence. While neighbourhood planning may create opportunities for communities to articulate locally grounded priorities, wider institutional constraints, political dynamics and development pressures continue to dominate realisation. The paper highlights how ‘participation’ or co-production in planning is insufficient to deliver more just neighbourhoods.

This study is based on the rehabilation and resettlement impact on Mumbai’s marginalised communities, with a special focus on Dalit (Scheduled Caste) and Muslim (Religious minorities). Various infrastructure projects are undertaken annually to support the city’s development and beautification. However, while performing these projects, the houses of marginalised communities were demolished. A displacement process occurred, and these displaced communities mainly resettled on the city’s periphery, 25- 30 km from their original homes. Various studies have examined the impact of slum rehabilitation and resettlement on communities. However, from the perspectives of gender and marginalised communities, this issue remains under-researched. This study draws on secondary literature and is based on a pilot study conducted from September 2024 to December 2024, followed by ethnographic fieldwork from January 2025 to June 2025.

During participant observation and interviews, it was observed that women, older people, and other marginalised communities in the resettlement colony, after displacement, face many challenges, including limited access to livelihood opportunities. Loneliness, nighttime security concerns, and the lack of a neighbourhood and socio-cultural environment create social sustainability issues.

In addition, due to a toxic, poorly built environment, congested, tight, packed building structures, and inadequate maintenance, many people suffer from various health-related problems such as asthma, skin diseases, tuberculosis, stress, suffocation, cancer, and more. Also, due to caste and religious identity, some conflicts arise in communities, including hierarchy and dominance by women of other castes that they have to face in their daily lives.

This study aims to guide policymakers and urban planners toward sustainable housing solutions by emphasising the participation of women and marginalised communities as key to community health, green infrastructure and a self-redevelopment housing model.

Social value is an increasingly prominent feature of the development process in England, yet the relationship between social value and planning obligations remains poorly understood and inconsistently practised. Despite the common objectives of planning and social value, their standards, practices and frameworks do not always align. For example, planning obligations have long been an important mechanism through which public goods are secured from development, often representing a significant source of social value.

However, a conceptual tension exists between mitigation (planning obligations required to address the negative impacts of development) and additionality (the genuine social benefits generated beyond core delivery requirements). Yet, there is not a clear and consistent methodology within social valuation processes to report the benefits which arise through this mechanism in social value terms. This creates a grey area where mitigation secured through planning obligations may be reported as additionality in social value assessments, creating inconsistency in reporting.

This paper presents and reflects upon emerging findings examining this tension. Drawing on document analysis, expert interviews with practitioners across England, and case study analysis of two large-scale mixed-use developments in London and the North West. The paper identifies current practices and practitioners' perceptions, and outlines progress towards a framework for attributing and reporting the social value secured through planning obligations, contributing to wider debates on planning's public value at a time of significant debate and potential reform to developer contributions in England.

Contemporary planning systems are often described as “entrepreneurial”, marked by privatization and growing developer influence over public deliberative governance. This binary framing, however, overlooks the expanding role of planning consultants as intermediary professionals operating between public and private actors. Since the emergence of “consultocracy”, the use of consultants in governance has grown significantly, driven by new policy demands, austerity, technological change, and privatization. The increasing reliance on private professional expertise and accelerated modes of policy development has raised concerns about public deliberation and the legitimacy of planning expertise.

This paper presents a systematic literature review (N=70) synthesising emergent research on the roles and impacts of planning consultants in urban planning. The review identifies planning consultants as hybrid actors fulfilling overlapping roles: as advocates for development interests, advisors producing technical evidence for public authorities, and increasingly as scrutineers evaluating planning knowledge and processes. The literature also points to a shift from specialist “expert” roles towards broader, multidisciplinary and managerial forms of consultancy – and from disciplinary professionals to “midwives” of project realization. These roles position consultants centrally in the production, validation, and mobilisation of planning knowledge, while embedding them in tensions between neutrality, professional norms, and client service.

Across contexts, several recurring impacts emerge (N = 11). Consultant involvement is associated with the marketisation of planning practice, capacity substitution, and knowledge production increasingly shaped by client needs. Empirical studies also highlight depoliticisation and the neutralisation of participation through technocratic expertise, alongside mounting accountability challenges. Through “pay-for-priority” dynamics, consultants can shape agenda-setting and policy prioritisation. The paper concludes that planning consultants are key agents in the restructuring of urban governance, warranting further research beyond Anglophone contexts.

The relationship between planning and property rights is both foundational and under-theorised, yet remains central to how land is governed, accessed, and contested. This paper offers a critical review of how property rights are conceptualised across ten major paradigms in planning theory, highlighting the silences, assumptions, and conceptual inconsistencies that shape this engagement. The paper reconceptualises property not as a static legal object but as a socially embedded and institutionally mediated arrangement of entitlements, obligations, and exclusions. The paper employs five analytical lenses: how property is conceptualised; how ownership and the public–private boundary are understood; how roles are assigned to key actors; how power and spatial justice are addressed; and how planning practices actively transform property rights through regulatory, administrative, and institutional intervention. It then systematically compares how different planning paradigms engage with property rights. The comparative analysis shows that while some paradigms, i.e., Marxist, Coasian, and neoliberal planning, foreground property as a structuring force, others, particularly rational, incremental, and collaborative approaches, treat it as a background constraint or overlook it entirely. These divergent orientations shape how planning is theorised as a mode of governance, particularly in relation to land commodification, state authority, and socio-spatial inequality. The paper concludes by calling for a more explicit theorisation of property within planning thought, arguing that planning theory must move beyond procedural concerns to engage more directly with the institutional and distributive dimensions of planning. The paper contributes to a growing agenda linking planning with questions of ownership, justice, and institutional transformation.

Low levels of trust have been reported across public institutions for years, and urban planning is no exception. The broad consensus in planning trust literature is an ongoing crisis of public trust in the planning system. While trust is recognised as a multidimensional concept involving both rational and affective components, planning literature to-date has failed to explicitly explore the relationship between emotional and rational cognitive drivers of trust in planning. A review of trust literature in allied fields reveals that dual-process theories of cognition are a promising avenue for addressing the gaps noted above.

Dual-process models suggest that human cognition operates through two systems: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and automatic, and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and analytical. Each of the two cognitive systems can influence the other, with intuitive perceptions informing deliberate perceptions, and deliberate cognition revising intuitive associations. As urban planning often involves emotionally charged decisions with high stakes for communities, dual-process theory provides a framework for understanding how public trust in planning systems is formed and maintained.

The present study (in progress) utilises a dual-process lens to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of public trust in the planning system. A mixed methods approach has been applied, inclusive of an Implicit Association Test (IAT). IATs are designed to surface automatic associations and implicit attitudes about the topic in question, in this case, the trustworthiness of the planning system. When analysed and interpreted alongside results of an Explicit Association Test (EAT), this approach can help provide insights on the cognitive processes underlying trust formation. This paper will present the development processes of the IAT, a novel method for studying public trust in planning systems. Key preliminary findings and trends will also be presented.

This paper will look at whether there is – and should be – a moral imperative to spatial planning.

It would do this by taking four possible approaches to examining this question. The first would be to examine – using reports and professional codes of conduct - whether planning has some form of higher mission. Secondly it would look at the relationship between the stated ‘moral improvement’ aims for planning in planning history, drawing on, for example, the history of model communities.

It would then look at how academic literature has considered spatial planning and morality, including, for example, the concept of ‘salvation through bricks’ coined by US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In doing so, it would need to look at the ability, or otherwise, and, importantly, the right of planning to seek to affect the morality of the population.

Finally, it may touch on built form as a physical reflection of a moral code, looking at, inter alia, Islamic principles embodied in design.

In covering this, the paper would need to define ‘morals’ as apposed to, for example, ‘ethics’, and would need to look at such matters as the concept of ‘right and wrong’ decisions (as contained in The RTPI’s own RTPI Learn website, for example).

The paper would, therefore, raise important questions about the role of planning as a sometimes-supposed value free profession and activity at a time when issues such as climate change may demand that we do take a moral stance in practice and when the increasing use of AI in planning raises questions of morality in decision making.

In the context of a profession under significant pressure from climate change, capitalism and Artificial ‘intelligence’ what is the future of planning- and how can we educate people to meet the future. 5 planning educators are in the running for the Role of Future Planning Tsar setting out their progressive pedagogy to attract the votes. What vision of 2035 will attract your vote?