Planning Futures? Panel 1: Decentering Planning
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 1: Decentering Planning
Moderator: Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

Faranak Miraftab, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Mustafa Dikeç, Professor of Urban Studies at the École d'urbanisme de Paris
AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.
Mona Fawaz, Professor in Urban Studies and Planning, American University of Beirut

Scholars in this panel asked us to re-think planning and its actors outside the normative planning box, by attending to spatial and temporal disjunctures, uprisings, political movements, displacements, mobilities, and everyday urban life. How can we understand the making of our cities by undocumented immigrants, formerly colonized populations, religious organizations, civil society movements, and the simple majority of people who produce, negotiate, contest, and transform cities? And how can the field of planning incorporate contested pasts and alternative futures into the planning process and its imaginations?