Potentials of Entrepreneurial Thinking for Planning

Abstract

Between 10 and 13 April 2017, the 11th AESOP Young Academics Conference took place at the Technical University of Munich on the theme of “Planning and Entrepreneurship – Planning and Public Policy at the Intersection of Top-down and Bottom-up Action”. The conference’s aim was to seek to understand (i) how planners can shape conditions so that young enterprises and innovative local activism can thrive and (ii) how planners themselves can benefit by integrating entrepreneurial thinking into their routines. The bandwidth of papers resembled the breadth of planning as a discipline gathered under the AESOP umbrella. Several bridges connecting planning and entrepreneurship became apparent, among them that (i) planning can provide an ecosystem for entrepreneurial activities that support local economies, providing a liveable environment for communities, (ii) planning approaches should succeed in incorporating the demands from market-based entrepreneurialism while creating a different and inclusive form of planning, and (iii) planners should support, and become, “hackers” and social entrepreneurs

Editorial: Planning and Critical Entrepreneurship

“…It is widely argued in planning that social entrepreneurship offers potential for incorporating broad socio-economic objectives into the delivery of urban spatial policy (Gilliard et al, 2017). However, such an endeavour also entails certain drawbacks, including the risk of instrumentalization of community-based organisations for neoliberal forms of 'empowerment' when "civil society groups take the entrepreneurial turn" (Van Dyck, 2011, p. 117).…”

Circular Area Design or Circular Area Functioning? A Discourse-Institutional Analysis of Circular Area Developments in Amsterdam and Utrecht, The Netherlands

“…Explained by Albrechts [1], one of the reasons is the growing influence of neo-liberal policies which has led a move from a more socially oriented policy to a more economic focused policy [6]. In response, cities and regions adapted a more entrepreneurial style of planning to enhance their competitiveness [7]. As at the same time the economy became depoliticized, policy, and thus also spatial policy, became 'regulated deregulated' and market logics set the tone [8].…”