Urban se propone servir de espacio para un debate en el que la planificación se juegue sus condiciones de posibilidad. Frente a la deriva disciplinar de las últimas décadas, frente al desplazamiento paulatino del lugar social de la planificación urbana y territorial en los modos de gobierno, nos parece urgente replantear el papel que ésta merece en las economías políticas de la producción de espacio.
Focus and scope
Using four major vectors of interest –a generalist, transversal character, a critical spirit, a regional vision of global processes and a recovery of the memory of our discipline– the new Urban is offered as a forum for debate in which the conditions of possibility intrinsic to planning are at stake. Faced with the disciplinary drift of recent decades, faced with the gradual sidelining of the social role of urban and territorial planning in government styles, we believe there is an urgent need to reappraise the desirable role of planning in the political economies involved in the production of space.
Urban has a generalist approach, in which there is room for different narratives, scales and contexts, and all the dimensions related to city and territory: from settlement models to governance models; from the analysis of social space to the analysis of forms of mobility; from a focus on the more recent requirements of our discipline –ideas about landscape, demands for environmental protection and sustainability of urban systems– to the recovery of the historical memory of urbanism and planning.
Urban maintains its commitment to the promotion of cities with more social justice, and thus adopts a critical position on the disciplinary drift in recent decades, in which planning has increasingly played a background role in government projects and spatial production plans that are far removed from the reformist roots that gave our discipline its prominence in the now declining Welfare States.
Urban presents a regionalist approach which is not circumscribed to ‘the region’, but takes advantage of the privileges of a local perspective as a platform to reappraise and respond to global paradigms. We want this journal to be a meeting point for different citizen-based cultures and techniques, using its privileged geographic position at the crossroads between the globalised North and South, between Europe, the Mediterranean and Latin America.
Urban does not gloss over the past of the cities, the citizens and the techniques that have regulated them. Following a genealogical approach, we propose to recover the memory of the city and the discipline of urban and territorial planning, reviving classic and long-forgotten texts and plans, reappraising them critically with a view to promoting a dialogue in which history becomes operative for current interests, and modern planning rediscovers its roots.
