Planning Practice & Research

Rethinking Planning Practice from the Global South: Conflict, Informality and Knowledge Production

Planning Practice & Research has consistently addressed key issues such as sustainability, spatial justice, participation and governance. Yet dominant planning debates remain largely grounded in conceptual, institutional and normative frameworks developed in the Global North. When the Global South is represented in planning scholarship, it is often approached as an empirical setting or a testing ground for externally produced models, rather than as a source of theory, methodology and situated planning knowledge.

Planning practice in the Global South unfolds through diverse institutions, everyday negotiations and unequal access to land, resources and decision-making. Structural informality, institutional plurality, persistent inequality, socio-territorial conflict and recurrent socio-environmental crises shape how planning is carried out, contested and understood. These conditions constitute the ordinary reality of planning practice in many contexts and offer valuable insights into the possibilities and limitations of established planning approaches.

This Special Issue seeks to reposition the Global South as a legitimate and productive site of planning knowledge production. By foregrounding situated experiences, it aims to critically examine what counts as planning, who plans, and how planning knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimised. It welcomes contributions that explore how communities, practitioners, public institutions and other actors negotiate priorities, develop responses to territorial challenges and generate knowledge through practice.

We invite original research articles, review articles and practice reviews that connect critical reflection with the realities of planning. Contributions should explain what can be learned from the experiences examined and how these lessons inform planning practice and research beyond their immediate context. Comparative perspectives and exchanges across Global South contexts are welcome, alongside work that recognises their internal diversity and avoids treating the Global South as a homogeneous category.

Topics may include:

•  Community-led and informal planning, planning beyond the state, and hybrid forms of governance.

•  Planning, power and socio-territorial conflict over land, housing, infrastructure and natural resources.

•  Colonial legacies, institutional change, and the circulation, adaptation or contestation of planning models.

•  Planning responses to overlapping climate, environmental, social, health and economic crises.

•  Learning from plans, policies and interventions that failed, produced unintended outcomes or encountered resistance.

•  Planning in small and medium-sized cities, rural–urban interfaces, extractive regions and peripheral territories.

•  Participatory, comparative, action-oriented and practitioner-informed methods for producing situated planning knowledge.

Submissions should make a clear contribution to the relationship between planning knowledge and practice and demonstrate their relevance to an international readership. Practice reviews should critically examine a planning experience, intervention or process, explaining its context, the actors involved, the challenges encountered and the lessons learned. Across all contribution types, the Special Issue seeks to advance understanding of how knowledge emerging from the Global South can inform planning debates and strengthen the link between planning research and planning practice.