Planning Futures? Panel 3: Re-thinking Planning from the Margins
Channel: Columbia GSAPP
Date: 2021-06-04

This one-day conference organized by Assistant Professor Hiba Bou Akar, brought leading planning and urban scholars who are re-thinking the field of urban planning and policy from postcolonial, decolonial, and abolitionist perspectives. It asked the following two interrelated questions: What are the futures of the field of urban planning, and what futures we ought to plan for when the future that is imagined in most of the world is one of state violence, dispossession, exploitation, war and conflict, pandemics, and climate change?

Panel 3: Re-thinking Planning from the Margins
Moderator: Delia Wendel, Assistant Professor of International Development and Urban Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Teresa Caldeira, Professor of Urban Planning, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
Akira Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
James Spencer, Vice Provost & Dean, Professor, Urban & Regional Planning, Louisiana State University
Libby Porter, Professor, Sustainability and Urban Planning, RMIT University

Margins —as geographies and positions of power, of excluded populations and neglected sites— can offer new insights to planning theory and practice. What new views of the center or the mainstream emerge when we foreground putatively marginalized perspectives? With a global and comparative group of scholars, this panel asks: how can we reconceptualize planning from the margins as well as from peripheral epistemic and ontological traditions? In parallel, what new planning theorizations could thinking from the margins bring to light?