2025 - AESOP Lecture Series 22
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Open Access AESOP | Lecture Series Event 22 Democracy and Planning: Neither Looking Down, Nor Up(AESOP, 2025) Balducci, SandraIn this AESOP Lecture Series 22 presentation, titled “Neither Looking Down Nor Up: 50 Years of Planning and Participation”, Professor Sandra Balducci delivers a deeply personal and intellectually rich reflection on her five decades of engagement in the field of urban and regional planning. Beginning with her formative experiences as a young activist in Milan’s peripheral neighbourhoods, she retraces her academic path through the Politecnico di Milano and UC Berkeley, while highlighting the influence of key mentors and intellectual traditions that shaped her thinking. Balducci explores the changing roles of planners—from expert designers to democratic facilitators—focusing particularly on conflict, participation, and the complexities of translating knowledge into action. She introduces the concept of the “trading zone” as a critical space where actors from different worlds (policy, academia, activism, citizens) can interact and co-produce situated knowledge. Through examples from local government, European research projects, and teaching practice, she illustrates how planning can serve as an enabling infrastructure for dialogue and transformation. The lecture also offers a candid critique of the current academic evaluation systems, warning against the reduction of research to bibliometric performance, and advocating instead for meaningful, engaged scholarship that embraces uncertainty, plurality, and care. Ultimately, Balducci calls for a reinvention of planning education, urging institutions to move beyond simulation and toward pedagogies rooted in real-world challenges, collective learning, and democratic hope.