Planetary Neighbourhoods
Edited by
Sila Ceren Varis Husar and Burcu Halide Ozuduru
Call for Abstracts
Multiple global crises, such as climate change, social injustice, economic instability, and public health emergencies, reshape urban agendas and accelerate transformations in the built environment, which are mostly visible at the neighbourhood scale, where local histories, cultural foundations, and socio-economic relations are both sustained and reconfigured across diverse contexts all around the world.
In the Planetary Neighbourhoods, we aim to contribute to the key literature on the social, economic, and political issues shaping urban life worldwide. This edited volume will bring together international scholarly work to synthesize state-of-the-art debates, research, and policy principles on neighbourhoods and community resilience. It conceptualizes neighbourhoods as multidimensional settings where physical form, social relations, governance, and identity intersect, and where top-down policies and bottom-up initiatives co-produce collective capacity. Emphasizing comparative and cross-cultural dialogue the book examines how neighbourhood strategies are adapted to diverse socio-political and cultural contexts, integrating tangible (built environment, infrastructure) and intangible (social networks, trust, cultural identity) dimensions, and put forward both good and bad practices and policy approaches from the perspective of urban planning that shed light on how we can deal with today’s challenges and shape urban futures.
The book is expected to comprise four sections and serve as a comprehensive sourcebook for graduate students, researchers seeking to develop an interdisciplinary approach, and practitioners. We are seeking abstracts for new, unpublished work on a wide range of topics that could fall under the following sections.
1) Recognizing Neighbourhoods as Multifaceted Entities, including the physical environment and shared infrastructure, while intangible aspects encompass social networks, cultural identity, and trust. For example, gated communities combine physical security measures (tangible) with a sense of exclusivity and community identity (intangible) (Webster, 2003). The chapters that follow address pressing, widely observed neighbourhood-scale issues, examining how these challenges are reshaping the conceptualization, investigation, and production of neighbourhoods.
2) Exploring Grassroots initiatives, including urban gardens and mutual aid networks, integrates physical spaces with social cohesion and collective action. For instance, community-run cooling centers address both climate adaptation (tangible) and social care (intangible).
3) Policy and Institutional Support, which integrates formal governance (e.g., municipal councils, zoning) with informal networks (e.g., neighbourhood associations, digital platforms) can set tangible investments alongside intangible objectives such as trust, inclusivity, and social cohesion. While informal solidarity networks often complement centralized governance in Turkey, participatory planning in some European cities institutionalizes resilience through co-produced decision-making. Given that neighbourhoods are dynamic and continually reshaped by political, social, and economic change, this section reframes their evolving roles and governance arrangements, offering forward-looking insights for adapting spatial and communal forms across contexts.
4) Scaling Local Innovations to Broader Geographies requires contextual translation rather than direct replication, as neighbourhood models must be institutionally, culturally, and infrastructurally recalibrated or replicated across settings. This section examines how concepts and paradigms of “neighbourhood” vary beyond Europe, interrogates the limits of dominant frameworks in diverse contexts, and identifies pressing questions around rights, recognition, and urban inequities.
If you are interested in contributing a chapter to Planetary Neighbourhoods, please go to the following link to fill out the survey: https://forms.gle/DUN9xt5iUFwgCnQ47. Please note that submitted abstracts will be considered for inclusion in the book proposal. If you have any questions, please contact us at
