Articles about AESOP in 2016
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Item Restricted Differences and connections: beyond universal theories in planning, urban, and heritage studies(Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2016)The annual Young Academics network of the Association of European School of Planning (AESOP YA) conference, entitled Differences and Connections, was held for the first time in a Southern Italian city, Palermo, Italy, during 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 19 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 postcolonial studies reveal (Chakrabarty 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 and 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 and Graham 1997; Robinson 2011).