Volume 01 (2015)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1778

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    Foreword Vol. 1 (2015) : Coral feefs, fresh streams and deep oceans in the future of planning research: Introducing plaNext in the framework of AESOP policies and strategies
    (AESOP, 2015) Lo Piccolo, Francesco
    I am happy to introduce the first volume of plaNext as one of the most challenging initiatives of our association. What is plaNext? plaNext is an open access online journal intellectually produced and managed by AESOP Young Academics. plaNext is published as part of the AESOP online publishing platform, InPlanning. It is an international peer- reviewed journal. It arises from the collective work of our community. And so, plaNext is many things at the same time.
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    Brazilian uprising : The spatial diffusion of protests during the June Journeys and the politics of identity
    (AESOP, 2015) Gonçalves de Almeida, Rafael; da Silveira Grandi, Matheus
    Brazil experienced, in June of 2013, the largest popular demonstrations in its recent history —an event that has been called the June Journeys. In this paper, we briefly address briefly the processes of spatial diffusion and dispersion observed during these journeys. We then reflect on how these processes relate to a politics of identity, and the strategies used by protesters to differentiate themselves from other groups, and by the State to classify the protesters in order to guide the use of police repression. Identity can, therefore, group individuals around a common struggle using as reference the location of the demon-stration as ‘spaces of identity reference’, but can also play an important role in the reproduction of dominant power relations by creating mechanisms with which to legitimate punitive action. The ‘vandal’ is, then, understood as the identity constructed to allow the transition from an indirect regulation to a mode of violent intervention. We conclude the paper by emphasising how both of these processes highlight the role of the politics of identity on this recent series of demonstrations in Brazil.
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    Safety and agonistic conceptions of public life
    (AESOP, 2015) Berglund Snodgrass, Lina
    This paper seeks to enable for conceptual resistance towards a desirable urban order of ‘safe public realms’, to which the ‘planning for safety’ directly contributes. One way of engaging in that kind of resistance is by contributing to politicising the system of beliefs informing planning for safety. Planning for safety is primarily legitimised morally as the ethically right thing to do given the identified violation of a human right in the public realm, the right to freely move about in the public environment. By drawing from Mouffean agonistic political theory (2005), there is no given interpretation nor implementation of ethical principles such as human rights, but rather different interpretations given what point of reference one is departing from, and should hence be subjected to political struggle. To conceptually set the arena for choice contributes to politicising phenomena which previously have been legitimised as the right or the (only) natural thing to do. ‘Planning for safety’ should therefore be interpreted resting on specific ideological assumptions of public life which frames both how ‘the human right’ is conceptualised as well as what planning solutions are considered possible.This article seeks to establish alternative conceptualisations of public life, with an aim to make visible how there is not one notion of public life and thereby re-politicise the ideolo-gical premises underpinning ‘safety planning’ and thereby allow for conceptual resistance. This is carried out by establishing a discursive field of public life, a kind of conceptual arena for choice making. The discursive field is represented by four different discourses of public life centred around different ideals such as rational, dramaturgical, conflictual and consensual public life. In this conceptual context, lines of conflict have been discerned based on a thematic of purpose, character, criteria for participation and conception of identities, which have taken the form of agonistic dimensions, from which planning discursively can position itself. This paper argues that we first must agonistically agree on what notion of public life should govern the development of our cities, and thereafter discuss what the consequences would be for planning.
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    An anatomy of hope
    (AESOP, 2015) Torisson, Frederik
    ‘So, it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world, of the possibility of, really, another organization of society, and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one.’(Alain Badiou)The paper seeks to elaborate on the concept of hope and the possibility of a ‘politics of hope’that goes beyond negation in relation to contemporary architectural practice. The focus will be on the affective modality of hope, the intra-personal, as opposed to the common understanding of hope as a personal feeling. Following Ernst Bloch’s notion of hope as ‘anticipatory consciousness’, the paper discusses the limitations and potentials of the principle of hope in contemporary spatial practices using Brecht’s dictum ‘something’s missing’ as a starting point for thinking about hope as a cognitive instrument. In a post-modern society, the notion of an ‘outside’ is hardly conceivable. The alternative orders of society imagined are almost invariably mirrors of what already is; these could be called utopias of compensation. At the same time, there has over the last couple of years been a rapid increase in instances of political upheaval, and the words change and hope are heard increasingly often in political discussion, signalling a dynamism as well as an openness in political discussion that goes well beyond the ideologies of the 20th century. Hope is in other words here understood as transformative; the concept is interlinked with the prospect of change. Hope is as an operative concept capable of a double move, simulta-neously being critical and propositional. The critical aspect is implicit in the connection to change; it denotes a desire for a different world than what is. The propositional aspect implies a direction and the exploration of an alternative. Hope in relation to spatial practices is thus concerned with the experimentation along the edge of the current doxai – challenging them and seeking to extend them.
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    The shape of knowledge redistribution within planning cultures : The question of resistance in the case of a large-scale urban development project in Vienna
    (AESOP, 2015) Peer, Christian
    With the beginning of the 21st century a series of large-scale urban development projects (LUDPs) were planned alongside the transformation or modernization of federal railway stations in Vienna. Herein, in October 2012 the City of Vienna together with the landowner set the course for a telling modified urban development project: the new general concept for the former railway station Wien Nordbahnhof. Just a stone’s throw away from the city’s center a new generation of citizens will find its home close or within the typological setting of an experimental superstructure, that is one of today’s biggest inner-city transformation zones, originally called the future city (“Stadt der Zukunft”). According to the city planners’ intentions the Nordbahnhof will be finished until the year of 2025 after a development process of more than three decades and a multifaceted process of public participation. The long period of development led to illuminating different imaginations of the future city and to a particular materialization of the shift of planning ideology into urban form, which accentuates a dialectical process of transformation. This paper focuses on crucial acts of resistance playing a role for the interplay of democracy and innovation within the transformation process in question.
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    Editorial introduction Vol. 1 (2015) : On the entangled paths of urban resistance, city planning and heritage conservation
    (AESOP, 2015) Hou, Jeffrey; Hammami, Feras
    Resistance, planning and conservation may seem like parallel or combating universes – while resistance almost always entails actions against the state institutions, planning and conservation practices function typically with and within them. These seemingly disen- gaged modalities of social and political processes came together as the focus of the 8th Annual AESOP Young Academics Conference, titled “Cities that Talks” that took place in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2014. The conference theme and an impressive array of case studies reflect the recent surge of urban resistance movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world. They also reflect a substantial level of interest among young academic scholars who, as a generation of young people, are themselves faced with social and political upheavals–including, but not limited to, the current impacts of neoliberal restructuring and austerity policies that percolate through the society today.
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    Re-designing commons in Italy
    (AESOP, 2015) Vianello, Michele
    The paper gives a critical account of the recent Italian debate on Commons concentrating on some theoretical problems, with reference to two different components: the economic research on the Commons, the juridical research on the property nature of Commons. It then puts them in parallel with the social demands arisen, articulated around the buzzword “Commons”. The mutual relationship among these components is analysed, stressing the generative aspects of the encounter between scholarship on one hand and the social, discursive use of the Commons concept on the other hand. Finally a research agenda based on the results of such analysis is proposed in order to re-compose the mentioned duality and partially overcome the difficulties that today harness the Italian debate on the Commons and its possible applications in urban planning