Conference Theme

This year’s conference theme is ‘Alternative Futures for Planning’.

The conference comes at a time when planning has never been so important, whether in relation to housing crises, a rapidly changing climate, population movement, or social injustice in our cities. However, it is important to ask whether current approaches to planning practice and research are adequate to meet these challenges? Do we have the tools, the theories, and the forums for debate that enable us to address these pressing issues? These are key questions for planning research and underpin our work here in Sheffield.

At the 2018 Planning Research Conference, we wish to encourage debate on how research, theory and practice can be devised to tackle these issues, and importantly to stimulate alternative ways of approaching these challenges. In doing so, we are interested in research that:

• Deepens our understandings of existing practices, policies, and institutions across a wide range of fields, from infrastructure and transport to housing, community development, and environmental planning
• Critically appraises how contemporary planning engages with core problems
• Considers alternative ways of tackling some of our most significant spatial challenges, whether through innovative policies and practices, reconfigured institutions, or new ways of thinking and approaching problems.

There are plentiful examples of people, organisations, and places that are thinking differently about planning. The Conference will provide the space to explore these, through presentations, roundtables, keynote talks and study visits.

We look forward to the contributions of scholars, practitioners and students to addressing these important questions, and thinking through the future of planning.

Professor Malcolm Tait

Conference Committee Chair and Head of Department, Department of Urban Studies and Planning