The Routledge Companion to Urban Planning
Nicholas A Phelps editor Sai Balakrishnan editor Luisa Sotomayor editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:26th Nov '26
£260.00
This title is due to be published on 26th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The Routledge Companion to Urban Planning challenges the conventional boundaries of urban planning, urging the field to embrace the complexities and ambiguities of the urban experience. It contends that urban planning must move beyond binary classifications—such as city/country or society/nature—and instead renew itself through language, theory, policy, and practices that engage with mixed forms, overlapping functions, and ethical concerns that lie in the in-between.
Urban planning, as a discipline, is inherently dialectical, simultaneously producing and undermining classifications that shape how we understand, navigate, and transform the world. Yet, within this tension lies a latent spectrum of alternatives. This volume takes this spectrum as its starting point, assembling 32 contributions from scholars and practitioners across the global North and South to critically interrogate and rework the epistemological foundations of planning. Through diverse empirical and theoretical contexts, the chapters explore how mixed forms, overlapping functions, and substantive questions unsettle conventional approaches to governance and intervention. Contributors examine the origins, contestations, and exclusions embedded in urban planning’s classifications, probing their limits and omissions. In doing so, the volume repositions planning as a field that must engage ambiguity, rethink its classificatory logics, and cultivate more adaptive, inclusive, and context-sensitive practices for the worlds between.
This companion will interest scholars and professionals in the areas of Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Governance, Policy Studies, Social Theory, Territorial Management, and Sustainable Development.
"This is a spectacularly assembled and provocatively conceived contribution to planning theory and practice that will upend traditional views of the planning profession, most particularly by challenging the standard epistemologies through which the discipline has operated for so long. In its questioning of conceptual binaries and its claims that there are no simplified let alone universal strategies for advancing just and equitable change, this engaged set of reflections on the "Worlds In Between" is an important albeit somewhat unsettling read. It offers no easy answers. Even so, it should and indeed must be a companion for any scholar or practitioner with the courage to call out the disempowering classifications, narrow-minded assumptions, and terminological ambiguities that routinely — and sometimes inadvertently — strengthen the hands of the strong while ignoring the subjectivity of the weak, whether in the Global North or South."
-- Diane E. Davis, Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard GSD, CIFAR Fellow and Co-Director, Humanity's Urban Future.
"The Companion is a highly welcomed addition to scholarship in planning. It covers a wide range of topics written by a diverse group of contributors who interrogate the conventional binary divisions between city and non-city, human and nature and public and private. Focusing on the ‘in-between’ these categories, they unsettle deep-seated dualities in planning. The volume is an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners who are interested and critically engaged in the contested
-- Simin Davoudi, Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK
"Featuring a line-up of authoritative and well-known contributors, this thought-provoking book unsettles conventional understandings of urban planning as both an academic discipline and a professional practice. The collection offers glimpses of the world from novel perspectives. Through deconstructing problematic categories and classification schemes, the authors and editors do an excellent job of significantly expanding the horizons of planning."
-- Fulong Wu, Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London, UK.
"Sotomayor, Phelps, and Balakrishnan have assembled a series of critical interventions at the cutting edge of recent research in the field. The Routledge Companion to Urban Planning marks an important and innovative contribution that disrupts existing binaries that have permeated the discipline."
-- Yasminah Beebeejaun, Professor, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL
ISBN: 9781032520209
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
544 pages