Differences and connections: beyond universal theories in planning, urban, and heritage studies

Abstract

The annual AESOP Young Academics (AESOP-YA) conference, entitled Differences and Connections, was held for the first time in a Southern Italian city, Palermo, Italy, 23-26 March 2015. The call for papers attracted a wide range of authors within the field of planning and other related fields. Forty-five contributions by young academic scholars, representing nineteen countries, were selected by the conference scientific committee to critically explore the themes of the conference. Over the last few decades, cities, societies, economies and institutional arrangements have experienced momentous changes, driven by globalisation, urbanisation, migration and mobility as well as totalitarian regimes, democratisation processes, and insurgencies. Scholars in planning and other related fields have engaged diverse critical debates to make sense of these trends and their impacts on spatial planning and urban governance. Several post-colonial studies reveal (Chakrabarthy, 2000;Santos, 2010) doubts about the capacity of mainstream and other universal theories to grasp and express the specific relationships that connect global trends with local characteristics. Studies on planning cultures (Sanyal, 2005; Knieling, Othengrafen, 2009;Getimis, 2012) and the methodological approach of phronetic research (Flyvbjerg, 2004) have stressed the importance of local contextual characterisations for the production of theory. Similar approaches in critical urban studies uncover the risk for building generalisations grounded in the study of a few global cities (Amin, Graham, 1997;Robinson, 2011).

Questioning Planning, Connecting Places and Times: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…This special issue of plaNext presents a selection of articles from the 9 th AESOP YA conference, "Differences and Connections: Beyond Universal Theories in Planning, Urban, and Heritage Studies", held in March 2015 in Palermo, Italy (see Caruso et al, 2016, for the conference report). The conference was designed to bring forward two perspectives: first, the need to fostering multi-and inter-disciplinary dialogues between planning theory and research, critical urban theories, human and cultural geography, critical heritage studies, and beyond; and, second, the idea that renewed efforts for comparative studies can help deparochialising urban theories too often based on the study of a few (global) cities, without giving up the construction of theoretical and horizontal understandings and explanations (cf.…”