The ‘New Normal’ in Planning, Governance and Participation: Transforming Urban Governance in a Post-Pandemic World

This book offers a unique and timely contribution, informed by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, to unpack the intertwined challenges that planning needs to cope with in the future. It argues that the pandemic and post-pandemic periods, in their successive waves of restrictions and social distancing, have disrupted ‘normal’ practices but have also contributed to shaping a “new normal”. The new normal is emerging, re-configuring, and prioritizing the substantive objects of planning and its governance and participatory processes. This book discusses this shift and presents a collection of episodes and cases from diverse European urban contexts to develop a new vocabulary for describing and addressing challenges, models, perspectives, and imaginaries that contribute to defining the new normal. Contributions from various geographical contexts and fields of investigation, include and bridges disciplines as urban planning, sociology, geography, anthropology, art, economy, technology studies, design studies and political science. The book offers:
• a discussion on the centrality of planning research and education in the evolution and progression of a new normal in relation to societal dynamics
• a framing of emerging theory-practice tensions informing a new normal planning
• an overview on the new objects and processes of planning in its intertwined aspects of governance and participation for the democratization of urban futures
The book presents 23-chapter contributions discussing and demonstrating how intertwined relations among planning, governance and participation in the urban context have transformed during the pandemic. It brings an international community of emerging and established scholars across countries, cities, and disciplines that converge into a solid perspective to better understanding the implications of a post-pandemic urban change. Three main parts articulate in 1) the theoretical framing that offers six chapters to understand governance and participation processes in new normal planning, 2) eleven experiences of planning, governance, and participation during the pandemic across countries and cities from – amongst others - Denmark, France, Portugal, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, and 3) critical perspectives highlighting possible future directions for a new normal planning. By reflecting and learning from the pandemic experiences, the book offers interesting insights for scholars, students, policy actors and practitioners interested in the evolving nature of planning and its dependence to societal transformations and governance, participation processes. Furthermore, the book contributes to reflect on persistent practices that will not just reproduce the exceptionality of the emergency but creates a persistent, long-lasting state of risk that brings upfront the need to set new priorities. The book suggests mechanisms for doing and knowing in planning that opens and advances solutions, models, and new future interlinked governance and participation perspectives for a new normal. This book offers an explorative journey that seeks to frame and contribute to the 'new normal' in theory and practice cases identifying challenges, and future perspectives in a global new normal.