Planning Futures? Panel 4: Frontiers and their Politics of 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 4 Frontiers and their Politics of Planning
5:00 pm -7:00 pm
Moderator: Kian Goh, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs

Katharine Rankin, Professor, Geography and Urban Planning, University of Toronto
Neema Kudva, Associate Professor, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
Malini Ranganathan, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University, Washington DC
Bjorn Sletto, Associate Professor, Community and Regional Planning, University of Texas at Austin
Sheryl-Ann Simpson, Assistant Professor, Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University

This panel challenged planning and development through the concept of the “frontier”— both as physical and imagined geography of accumulation and dispossession and political transformation, as well as a conceptual framework of futures to be imagined and steered whether of climate change or social equity. How might our understanding of frontiers in planning — across territorial, historical, and conceptual contexts — help us sift through the stakes and potentialities of planning research and practice? What are the consequences of such inequalities for equitable development? How can existing research, such as that of the panelists, on global geographies, feminist and critical theory, political ecology, and critical development studies, carry these questions forward in new ways?