Volume 08 (2019)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1771

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    Activism by lay and professional planners : Types, research issues, and ongoing analysis
    (AESOP, 2019) Sager, Tore
    Activism was one of the main themes of the AESOP PhD Workshop 2018 in Karlskrona and Tjärö, Sweden. One of my presentations was about the activist roles of planners working for local governments and lay planners affiliated with civil society organizations. I have kept a close eye on the academic literature on activist planning for many years, and am still working in that sub-field of planning theory. My aim is to explore the limits of how professional planners with an activist intent can practice their line of work inside a bureaucracy, and to study how actors from the civil society can use spatial planning and local environmental planning in combination with direct action as a strategy for achieving their goals. To specify the kind of planning I have in mind, I follow Healey (1997:69), stating that: ‘Spatial and environmental planning, understood relationally, becomes a practice of building a relational capacity which can address collective concerns about spatial co-existence, spatial organisation and the qualities of places’. Activist planners can contribute to the processes of such planning and help collect and form the input to spatial and environmental plans.
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    Activist researchers : Four cases of affecting change
    (AESOP, 2019) Sharkey, Megan; Lopez, Monica; Katharine Mottee, Lara; Scaffidi, Federica
    Researchers in urban planning are frequently motivated by the desire to facilitate positive social change. In seeking better ways to effect change, the researcher becomes an activist by engaging with social and environmental issues in a meaningful way to solve a problem. It is also often at this nexus where practice and academia meet, where the researcher adopts an activist role. In this paper we argue that activist research requires researchers to place themselves in one of two dominant positionalities or engagement positions: the insider or the outsider, as they join efforts with their research participants and activities. Using four case examples from our own research, we discuss how each positionality influences the production of new knowledge in both practice and theory. We reflect on challenges faced by early-career activist researchers in adopting activist research approaches, highlighting implications for undertaking this type of research in urban planning, and the need for a rethink from current discourses to set a path for a more hopeful future.
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    Editorial Vol. 8 (2019) : Making Space for Hope: Exploring its Ethical, Activist and Methodological Implications
    (AESOP, 2019)
    This volume is a special issue with contributions that stem from the collaborations of the 2018 AESOP PhD workshop, held 5-8 July at Tjärö island, Sweden. The overarching aim of the workshop was to establish inclusive spaces for dialogue and collaboration between PhD students across countries and continents on issues that pertained to the AESOP’s 2018 congress theme “Making space for hope”. Furthermore the PhD students got the chance to learn from the invited mentors with long experience from the academic planning field. The theme drew from a recognition of the severe challenges facing the world at present, for example, challenges coupled with the climate crisis, growing social inequalities, rapid population growth in urban regions and de-population trends in peripheral regions. Planning, considered broadly, is an activity that is striving to create better futures. It is an activity for maintaining predictability and stability whilst responding to societal challenges. Yet, it has been pointed out by policy makers as well as by researchers that planning is unable to effectively respond to these challenges with its traditional sets of approaches, calling instead for new and innovative planning methods. But this conference call asks not only for innovative approaches, but also for a more “hopeful research agenda” that challenges the “dystopian” views on the world that is represented in much research, in which cities are “...depicted as dark and dysfunctional places wrecked by endless capitalist crises and social-ecological catastrophes” (Prakas, 2010 in Pow, 2015, p. 464; cf. Torisson, 2015). The AESOP congress local organising committee argued that: “...planning should contribute to making space for hope [and we] need to go beyond mainstream politics, negation and cynicism. Instead planning debates ought to “excavate” the hidden and submerged desires for better future by exploring hope and optimism” (AESOP bid 2015, emphasis added).
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    Exploring critical constructive thinking in planning studies
    (AESOP, 2019) Tasan-Kok, Tuna
    One of the distinctive characteristics of urban planning as a discipline is its responsibility to educate practitioners who have to ‘go out there and get things done’. The world of planning today is seen by scholarly literature as an exciting, but also a challenging, profession in reference to the political economic framework which is dominated by authoritarianism, neoliberalism, informality, crime, fragmentation, depoliticization, and populism (see Filion, 2011; Gunder, 2010; Kunzmann, 2016; Ponzini, 2016; Ruming, 2018; Tasan-Kok & Baeten, 2011; Thornley, 2018; Sager, 2009; Roy, 2015). Although the practitioner’s role is prone to high levels of political and economic pressures in this ‘dark’ impression, recent studies have shown that there is a tendency among planning practitioners to push boundaries (Forester, 2013; Tasan-Kok et al., 2016; Tasan-Kok & Oranje, 2017) and even to become activists (Sager, 2016). Furthermore, work with planning students shows that radical critical approaches in planning education may turn into mere cynicism when they do not offer an analysis of problems or offer tools for alternative and emancipatory ideas (Tunström, 2017). Keeping this viewpoint in mind, and the theme of the 2018 AESOP Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden, which was ‘Making Space for Hope’, I proposed to place ‘critical constructive thinking’ in planning research under the spotlight as a topic for discussion with PhD students and young scholars during the AESOP PhD workshop, which followed the same theme of ‘hope’. It provided an excellent platform to debate for planning researchers on how to remain critical while still being able to provide constructive solutions in a landscape of complex social, economic and political relations and power dynamics. These are, I believe, also fundamental characteristic of planning practitioners and should be highlighted in planning education.
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    Foreward Vol. 8 (2019)
    (AESOP, 2019) Tulumello, Simone
    My very first experience with AESOP happened during the second year of my PhD, when I was lucky enough to be selected for the PhD workshop in Seili Island, Finland. I remember that week of “confinement”, so to speak, in an island with a bunch of fellow students and mentors, as a turning point for my PhD. And I am referring not only to the specific inputs I received on my paper; but also to the possibility to share joys and frustrations of a starting academic life in a very horizontal environment, with students and senior researchers. That is why, when I was invited to join the 2018 PhD workshop, again in a northern island, Tjäro, Sweden, but this time as a mentor, I was both flattered and excited. I had the opportunity to contribute to the creation of a similar sense of sharing and academic exchange. Once again, the participation to the workshop was a turning point for my academic career. Indeed, I have learnt more than I can have thought – isn’t this the main lesson to be learnt?
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    How power relationships are involved in research methods
    (AESOP, 2019) Bandsma, Koen; Greinke, Lena; MacCarthy, Danielle
    With the rise of activism and activist research, this paper explores how power relationships are involved in traditional and emerging methods used in research on activism. This question matters as research methods have the potential to both improve the capacities of activist groups and enhance knowledge of agents involved: researcher and activist. The added value of the paper is that it presents a range of methods used in research on activism, including new methods that are relatively uncommon in planning research. The second contribution of this paper is that it is based on a power framework by Forester; it analyses how power is embedded in the use of a particular research method. The authors find extant differences between the methodologies when analyzed through this framework, especially in their potential to involve with activist communities. The authors encourage researchers to be braver in using activist research methods and to be aware of the underlying power discourses in their choices.