Planning Futures? On Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Abolitionist Planning Conference

Planning Futures? On Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Abolitionist Planning is a one-day virtual conference organized by Hiba Bou Akar, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, and the Post-Conflict Cities Lab directed by Bou Akar. It brings together leading planning and urban scholars who are re-thinking the field of urban planning and policy from postcolonial, decolonial, and abolitionist perspectives. It asks the following two interrelated questions: What are the futures of the field of urban planning, and what futures should we 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?

Introduction
Hiba Bou Akar, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP
Amale Andraos, Dean of Columbia GSAPP

Panel 1: Decentering Planning
Scholars in this panel ask 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?

Participants:
Faranak Miraftab, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mustafa Dikeç, École d'urbanisme de Paris
AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield
Mona Fawaz, American University of Beirut
Moderated by Sai Balakrishnan, UC Berkeley

Panel 2: Decolonizing Planning
What does it mean to “decolonize planning,” both normatively and in practice? How do we learn from, theorize, practice, as well as differentiate between postcolonial, decolonial, and abolitionist planning while placing these movements in their proper and distinct historical and academic contexts? And given historical and ongoing realities of settler colonialism, white supremacy, economic precarity, and neoliberal inequality, and occupation, what role can and should planners play in engaging the field’s historical origins, and what future direction(s) represent possibility and potential for the field to envision and inscribe socially just and contextually suited interventions?

Participants:
Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles
Andrea Roberts, Texas A&M University
Oren Yiftachel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Vanessa Watson, University of Cape Town
Moderated by Hiba Bou Akar, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP

Panel 3: Re-thinking Planning from the Margins
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?

Participants:
Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley
Akira Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania
James Spencer, Louisiana State University
Libby Porter, RMIT University
Moderated by Delia Wendel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Panel 4: Frontiers and their Politics of Planning
This panel challenges 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?

Participants:
Katharine Rankin, University of Toronto
Neema Kudva, Cornell University
Malini Ranganathan, American University Beirut
Bjorn Sletto, University of Texas at Austin
Sheryl-Ann Simpson, Carleton University
Moderated by Kian Goh, University of California, Los Angeles

Free and open to the public. Advance registration is encouraged.