Conference theme: Building Planning Up

Across the UK and Ireland, planning is being asked to address increasingly complex spatial, environmental, economic, and societal challenges. The climate crisis, demographic shifts, technological change, and widening inequalities all shape contemporary debates about what planning is expected to deliver. At the same time, planning education, research, and professional capacity face significant pressures.

The conference theme “Building Planning Up” invites scholars to explore how the intellectual foundations of planning might be drawn on, renewed, and re‑examined to place planning at the heart of solving these conditions rather than a barrier to action. Wales’ future‑focused approach to planning, shaped by the Well‑being of Future Generations Act, strong citizen engagement, and co‑production of policy, offers important insights for the wider UK and Ireland. Its environmental agenda and distinctive planning system illustrates how long‑term, place‑based, and collaborative planning can be embedded in practice. Rather than focusing solely on reforming planning practice, this conference centres the role of academic inquiry in supporting planning’s future, conceptually, methodologically, and discursively.

We welcome contributions that investigate how planning knowledge is constructed, contested, translated, and mobilised across different academic, political, and community contexts. This includes examining how planning ideas move between theory and practice, how planning concepts are interpreted by wider publics, and how academic research can contribute to understanding or reframing the challenges currently facing planning systems.

This conference encourages submissions that explore how planning’s theoretical foundations, methodological innovations, and disciplinary identity are evolving as well as how these developments relate to, challenge, or inform planning practice. We invite papers that interrogate the relationship between academic research and real‑world implementation, that analyse how planning is understood across different publics, and that reflect on the role of research in shaping long‑term spatial futures.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest linked to the theme may include (but are not limited to):

• theoretical development and re‑theorisation within planning
• epistemological debates and the construction of planning knowledge
• interdisciplinary perspectives on planning scholarship and the role of planning in society
• the circulation, development, application, translation, or misinterpretation of planning ideas in practice, politics, and community discourse
• historical and comparative analyses of how planning knowledge has shaped (or been shaped by) public narratives or practices over time
• methodological innovation and its potential to reshape academic debate or applied planning work
• the role of universities, research networks, and academic communities in shaping the discipline

Topics not connected to the theme are more than welcomed. Please see the abstract submission tab for a list of thematic tracks.