DPU60

Thinking Across Boundaries: Re-Imagining Planning in the Urban Global South

Our Anniversary Conference took place between 2 and 4 July 2014. It was one of the highlights of a year of celebrations marking the DPU’s 60 years of education, training, research, consultancy and knowledge sharing in urban and regional development policy and planning in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Over 200 people attended the conference in total, joining a range of speakers drawn from academia, practice and community organisation. The themes of the conference were:

A future for urban development planning? Thinking across boundaries A future for urban development planning?  Approaches to urban inequality and informality in cities of the global south  Participation and contested practices in urban design and planning: rights, needs and urban imaginaries

 

Outputs

Several outputs were launched during or shortly after the event:

If you were not able to join us, or would like to revisit an of the conference sessions, recordings can be listened to or downloaded from our DPU60 podcasts. In the build up to the event we release three videos as part of the mini-series Thinking Across Boundaries: Planning Dilemmas in the Urban Global South, which are outputs from the research project of the same name. To coincide with the start of the event the DPU Reflections Working Paper Series was launched, featuring papers from former DPU staff. Sixty Years of Urban Development: A Short History of the DPU: The booklet was disseminated and is now available to view on Issuu. A series of interviews filmed with former DPU staff - Looking Back, Looking Forward - was on display throughout the event. A poster exhibition, Theses Across Boundaries, presented the work of our current crop of PhD students, and was present throughout the 3 days of the conference.

• Re-imagining socio-environmental trajectories of change: Radical practices and approaches to environmental planning and governance
• Forging new relationships in governance and planning: the state, market and society in a post economic crisis world
• Urban Development and development assistance
• Gender, intersectionality and socially just futures: Planning in an era of social polarisation
• Positioning planning learning in an urbanizing world: the challenge of practitioner formation and the co-production of knowledge

Thinking Across Boundaries: Planning Dilemmas in the Urban Global South

The Development Planning Unit is critically reflecting on a dominant theme in both its own practice and within current development planning and practice. It is engaging in this process by convening a panel discussion, which took place at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference in London on 30 August 2013) and commissioning a video featuring the DPU in conversation with key actors in the debate, that can be widely disseminated (see below).

The notion of the ‘urban global south’ has made a rapid career in contemporary debates about urbanisation, development and globalisation. It is also, however, facing increasing scepticism. Are we running the risk of aborting a powerful concept before its capacity to rexoginenate planning debates has been fully explored? If we agree with Ananya Roy that planning is both the ‘face of power and order’ and ‘social struggle’ in urbanisation processes, what possibilities does the notion of the ‘urban global south’ open for thinking and acting upon cities?

Within these series of  videos, we would like to question what invoking the ‘urban global south’ involves as a progressive critique of contemporary forms of urbanisation, planning and politics. Calling upon a range of key contributors to this debate, we aim to reproblematise the notion of planning in/for the ‘urban global South’ from an ontological, epistemological and axiological perspective. The panel will explore the following interlinked set of questions:

1.    Why call it the ‘urban global south’?

What is the urban global south? What processes make cities and citizens in certain parts of the world ‘different’? What does such difference entail and how should it be treated theoretically and practically? Are we simply reacting to the perceived inability of terms such as the ‘Third World’, ‘Developing World’ and ‘Industrialising Countries” to capture the urban in the midst of globalisation? Or are we seeking to aprehend something profoundly distinctive about the contemporary geography of urbanisation and development?

 2.    What kind of urban theory is required?

Are those key theoretical perspectives concerned with reproblematising the urban condition, canvassing something intrinsically distinctive about the trajectories of urbanisation and development outside advanced capitalist economies? If so, are they rendering maintream theorisations of the urban obsolete? Do we require a new urban theory or the reworking of existing conceptualisations?

3.    What kind of planning and praxis?

What do current debates on the urban global south imply for planning and praxis? Do they simply denote the need for contextualised approaches? Or do they call for a reconceptualisation of planning? Do they need to be delinked or relinked from Western planning theory? Do they open new avenues for emancipatory action? Why, with what consequences and for whom?

The session convened at the RGS Annual Conference was chaired by Caren Levy (DPU). With inputs from panelists Adriana Allen (DPU), Edesio Fernandes (DPU Associates), Aromar Revi (Indian Institute for Informal Settlements) and Mark Swilling (Sustainability Institute, Stellenbosch University)

The project is driven by Adriana Allen, Caren Levy, Barbara Lipietz and Colin Marx, with the support of UCL Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities.

In 2014 the DPU celebrated 60 years of education, training, research, consultancy and knowledge sharing in urban and regional development policy and planning in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. DPU’s focus on urban development and planning in what is now often referred to as ‘the global south’ was unique in the UK and abroad at the time of its establishment at the Architectural Association in 1954, as well as when it moved in 1971 from the AA to UCL.

DPU colleagues then actively contributed to a dynamic post-colonial history of development debates, planning practices and planning education, helping to forge alternative, socially just innovations in the emergent field of urban development planning. It is the legacy of this unique urban agenda that the DPU60 Reflections Working Papers Series seeks to collate.

The series has been developed in partnership with DPU Associates, a network which brings together former DPU colleagues who maintain a close relationship with current DPU teaching, research and consultancy. In line with the overarching theme of the DPU60 Anniversary celebrations – Looking Back, Looking Forward – the series seeks to cover a range of topics that have been and continue to be central to the DPU’s work, from the vantage point of some of the key historical actors in the debate.

You might also be interested in the Looking Back, Looking Forward interview series, which feature several of the authors of the papers below.

DPU Reflections

#166. Nexus: New approaches to resourcing cities
01 July 2014

#162. From master plans to city development strategies
01 July 2014

#167. Knowledge, politics and development policy: Reflections over four decades
Author: Desmond McNeill

#164. Affordable housing: Chimera or oxymoron?
Author: Babar Mumtaz

#165. Gender planning and development: Revisiting, deconstructing and reflecting

#163. Urban public housing strategies in developing countries: whence and whither paradigms, policies, programmes and projects