PLANNING AS A TRANSFORMATIVE ACTION IN A AGE OF PLANETARY CRISIS
37th Association of European Schools of Planning Annual (AESOP) Congress
Istambul, 7-11 July 2025
The 37th AESOP Congress, “Planning as a Transformative Action in an Age of Planetary Crisis”, starts from a blunt diagnosis: the world is living a stacked crisis—climate breakdown, ecological degradation, pandemics, conflict, housing precarity, displacement, and food insecurity—whose common denominator is a development model that has treated growth as a proxy for success, often at the expense of ecosystems and social justice. Inequalities have deepened, vulnerabilities have widened, and the ecological limits of urban regions are no longer an abstract boundary but an everyday condition.
Against this backdrop, the Istanbul congress asks what it actually means for planning to be transformative. If the post-carbon transition demands sobriety rather than spectacle, then “innovation” cannot remain a technical slogan: it must be judged by its capacity to deliver spatial justice, ethics, and care—redistributing access to resources, public space, and opportunities, while keeping cities and regions within planetary limits. The core question is simple and uncomfortable: how can planning move from managing crises to reshaping the systems that produce them—toward cities that are equitable, inclusive, resilient, and genuinely sustainable for all?
Convenor: AESOP Association of European Schools of Planning
Conference contributions
- From a linear infrastructure to a logistic operational landscape: the BreBeMi Motorway in Bergamo plateau; Pietrangeli, E.; Paris, M.