Original 1945 Testudo - Image from: UMD website
We move across neighborhoods, cities, and continents. We commute to work, migrate in search of opportunity or safety, and return to the places that shaped us. Movement isn't only physical, either. It can be cultural and embodied, carried through dance, ritual, protest, pilgrimage, or the routines of an ordinary day. Places change us as we move through them, and we leave something behind in the places we pass. As planners, designers, and storytellers, we understand that movement is rarely just about getting from one place to another. It's about identity, belonging, exchange, adaptation, and how the environments we build shape the lives we're able to lead.
For this issue of TerraPlan, we're asking contributors to explore movement as a lived process shaped by the places we move through and what we experience along the way. We want to go beyond movement as an engineering problem to what it means to actually live through it. A story about transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, highways, or airports shouldn't end with the infrastructure itself. It should ask how these spaces shape everyday life. How do they affect comfort, dignity, safety, accessibility, and belonging? Whose movements are supported, whose are restricted, and whose go unseen? Whether your work explores migration, commuting, walking, cycling, public transit, dance, ritual, or another form of movement entirely, we want you to examine how movement connects people to culture, memory, and place, and how planning and design can make that experience more equitable, meaningful, and humane.
Cities are shaped by the stories we inherit and the futures we dare to imagine. The second issue of TerraPlan — Our Time: Memory and Imagination in Planning— explores the role of memory, history, narrative, and vision in urban planning practice.
Community planning is inherently shaped by both the natural world and human nature through environmental justice, green infrastructure, climate resilience, and ethical decisions. The inaugural issue of Terraplan— Our Nature— reflects on how we design cities in harmony with nature.