TRANSFORMATIVE PLANNING ACTIONS FROM THE SOUTH: NEGOTIATING THE PAST FOR ALTERNATIVE FUTURES 

Organizers

Christine Mady, Aalto University
Joumana Stephan, American University of the Middle East
Ohoud Kamal, American University of Madaba

Presenters

Kundani Makakavhule, University of Pretoria
Claudia Ortiz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Michelle Meza, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México UNAM
Sadaf Sultan Khan, Institute of Development Studies
Saija Hollmen

The special session is based on the International Planning Studies Special Issue on Southern Urbanism. It presents the perspectives of the co-editors on the significance of focusing on spatio-temporal juxtapositions to understand the role of hidden and documented pasts, lived presents and possible futures.  This session proposes approaching urban complexities from a global perspective, and challenging universalism, to explore diverse narratives of often forgotten geographies, under-represented urban processes, and lived experiences of marginalised societies. The session emphasises the importance of alternative insights into ontologies, etymologies, and epistemologies of cities globally, to enable deep learning from the past, mitigating present challenges, and preventing future threats. While ample research covers the Global North, similar efforts are required to put on the map literature from the Global South and enable global dialogue. Often there are unveiled pasts that do not surface in planning decisions and projects or are lost in a palimpsest of eclectic applications of urban planning, which disregard contextual histories and specificities. Regardless of how pasts are treated, and the extent of inclusive and just urban presents, the looming threat of apocalyptic futures does not differentiate between aligned or fragmented urban planning paths. Against this background, reflecting on urban complexities in both the Global South and North is essential. This session proposes to conduct this reflection through the following aspects:

• Colonial pasts and alternative understandings: the first aspect explores alternative stories of coloniality’s legacies through dialogues of erasure, persistence, and re-imaginings. It provides a revisit in history to unravel undocumented pasts.
• Everyday Urbanism and Community Perspectives: the second aspect situates and requestions north-south classifications of everyday urban dynamics within public spaces through cross-cutting experiences in different geographic contexts. 
• Climate Crisis responses: the third aspect provides an understanding and recreation of knowledge about the climate crisis at the local scale from different global South contexts, specifically where the impact is most severe, and examines manifestations of situated practices.

Key words: Colonial, everyday urbanism, climate crisis, Global North, Global South