The recent global financial crisis and its reproduction in other sectors and scales aroused many hopes of a progressive shift which would use the common denominator of a renewed central role of planning in modern governmental systems, operating on different levels, from local to global, perfecting a broad range of policies. The neo-liberal restructuring processes unleashed by the crisis in the 1970s triggered a gradual cutback in the welfare models that were consolidated in previous decades. During the subsequent process, planning has been questioned and often relegated to a backseat role in political programmes, with disastrous results. In the heat of the recent breakdown of this deregulatory model and expecting a symmetrical displacement, critical voices have once again begun to imagine a recomposition of planning’s former social role under a renewed statute.

However, events to date suggest that a quite different trend is emerging. Policies now at stake remind us insistently of the old regulationist claim: that crises are merely mechanisms used to rebalance the capitalist system at the end of a certain stage once the prefigured proliferation of agents and niches of accumulation have been taken to an extreme. Instead of paving the way for the return of welfare models and a social ethos, this crisis seems to be encouraging the imposition of even stricter programmes and more severe restructuring strategies onto the already exhausted public agents.

In Urban, we want to ask ourselves about the place that can still be imagined for planning and progressive urban policies at this crossroads; about the destiny and the perspectives of cultural capital associated with urbanism in a context of uncertainty and institutional hostility; about the possibilities and the coordinates of this renewed statute for planning, long desired but never achieved. What sort of plans should we pursue? What sort of cities and citizens? What role must they play in the current economic context and in the myriad of social geographies? How can they articulate the heritage of their past in the context of growing criticism and new demands made by our ‘society of difference’, ecology and technological change?

The first issue in the new era of Urban strives to open up the debate about these issues to global as well as regional and local perspectives, using a transdisciplinary approach and a firm commitment to a search for more just territories.

Deadline for Submission: 30-09-2010