Track 14 INCLUSION

Track chairs: Angela Million, Alice Menzel, Giulia Marzani

This track focuses on how we can plan cities and regions that serve all and are welcoming to shifting demographic landscapes, including children and young people, aging populations, migrants and other vulnerable and marginalised groups. In a world with significant global challenges, such as climate change, decarbonisation, rapid demographic shifts, and ongoing conflict, which often affect already vulnerable populations most severely, we stand at a pivotal moment that calls inclusive planning responses. The transition from grey to green cities raises fundamental question: who are cities and regions planned for? whose needs and knowledge shape planning decisions? who is able to participate in, benefit from and shape urban transformation? Who risks being excluded or displaced?

This track aims to explore alternative and innovative analytical and methodological tools, alongside fresh conceptual frameworks, that amplify the voices of vulnerable and marginalized communities, ensuring they are front and centre in shaping future cities. We invite contributions addressing inclusion both as an outcome of planning and as a planning process, including questions of participation, accessibility, representation and the recognition of diverse forms of knowledge. Feminist, intersectional, postcolonial and other critical approaches to planning are particularly welcome, including work that examines how power, care, everyday life and embodied experience shape participation in planning and access to urban resources.

On this basis, issues such as diversity, age, gender, disability, religion, different identities, heterogenous onto-epistemological positions, vulnerability, urban and regional inequalities, urban poverty, migration including climate- and politically driven migration, displacement driven by mega transport- and urban development-projects, are all central to the contemporary discourse on inclusion. 

Within the Congress theme, the track is also interested in the unequal social and spatial consequences of decarbonisation and greening. These may include green gentrification and displacement, unequal access to green infrastructure and healthy environments, energy transition, the accessibility and affordability implications of mobility transitions, climate-induced migration, and conflicts over the distribution and use of urban space. How planning systems, policies and spatial transformations may produce, reproduce or redistribute vulnerability? How can planning prevent low-carbon transitions from creating new forms of exclusion or reinforcing existing ones?

Keywords: inclusive planning, feminist planning, intersectionality, participation and co-production, social infrastructure, spatial inequality, green gentrification, inclusive low-carbon transition, displacement, young people, ageing, migrants, refugees