Critical Planning

The contributions assembled in Volume 28: Margins and Junctures demonstrate just how scholarship rooted in the margins can illuminate the political, material, and affective pressures which shape our present junctures. Across the volume, authors show how the margins function simultaneously as sites of acute vulnerability and of world-building. They reveal how violence (e.g., infrastructural, bureaucratic, spectacular) is rendered ordinary via the doctrines of planning, instruments of finance, and the routines of institutions. At the same time, they foreground how alternative social relations are practiced and defended in spaces often dismissed as marginal: in libraries, housing struggles, accessibility audits, creative practice, and collective organizing. Taken together, these works insist that critical urban scholarship cannot remain detached from the conditions it analyzes. It must remain accountable to those who live at the sharpest edges of contemporary urban restructuring, where the consequences of political decisions are most immediate and where the possibilities for different urban futures are being actively forged.