Berkeley Planning Journal

When the editorial board of the BPJ met in late 2009 to decide on a theme for this volume, we took two issues as starting points. First, while the current economic crisis (entering its third year at our meeting time) had been conceived in the ether of the financial sector, its on-the-ground manifestations – from the foreclosed neighborhoods in the American inner cities and remote suburbs to the unfinished skyscrapers in Dubai – were, in fact, ultimately urban in nature. Second, we grappled with the question of what to make of the apocalyptic discourses of “crisis” ubiquitous in media, academic circles and, to be fair, even our own conversations. In other words, we decided that we did not want to publish an issue of the BPJ iterating that the crisis has arrived, is here to stay, or is on its way out; instead, our focus and main concern for this issue is exploring what this crisis, or more specifically, what all the “discourses” of crises for planning, whether as practice or as academic discipline, mean for cities and for city dwellers around the globe.