Call for Submissions
The Volume 33 call for submissions is now open through October 1, 2023!
Special Issue: Publics/Counterpublics
40th Anniversary of the Berkeley Planning Journal, Spring 2024
Planning as a discipline and a practice has derived its legitimacy from acting in the name of the “public.” Depending on context this has fallen between identifying a broader public interest through technical expertise and interpreting a popular will through participation and accountability. Planners cannot progress without re-thinking the concept of an unmarked public that can hide social asymmetries, naturalize its differential impacts, or present the interests of one group as the interests of the whole. Can the public still represent a collective political project and a normative aspiration for planning, in the face of the privatization and co-optation of institutions by unaccountable interests? With the 40th anniversary of the Berkeley Planning Journal, we are soliciting journal articles, book reviews, reflections, and multimedia submissions from a broad array of planners and urbanists to explore the current state of the “public” in planning, its limitations as well as its new interpretations and possibilities for the contemporary moment.
Black studies and queer theory develop concepts of counterpublics: spaces of resistance, contestation, conflict, and deviation against and in the process of public formation (Warner 2002). As Cathy Cohen (2004) writes, counterpublics are spaces “where not only oppositional ideas and discourse happen, but lived opposition, or at least autonomy, is chosen daily.” What counterpublics have arisen within or in response to planning processes? How should the planning academy recognize the politics of refusal and illegibility of the “undercommons” inside and outside of the academy (Moten and Harney 2013)?
A pragmatist approach questions the limits of the public: who constitutes a public through collective inquiry on common problems, how and when a public arises, and to what effect? This unsettles the imperial claim planning makes to represent the public, while opening radical and sometimes contradictory forms of interpreting and serving these democratic multiplicities (Lake 2017). It also invites planning academia to open the scientific community of planning.
In the inaugural 1984 Berkeley Planning Journal, Hilda Blanco wrote that one of the defining characteristics of Berkeley planning was a “social conscience, expressed in its early rejection of the planning profession as merely technical expertise, its critical attitude towards established institutions, and its strong advocacy for social justice.” We especially encourage contributions in this spirit; that bridge planning theory, technique, critique, and practice; that center issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, migration, and marginality in planning; that work across topics and subfields.
Instructions for Authors:
Papers will be subject to a peer-review process. Manuscripts have to be original (not published elsewhere), and should conform to the following submission lengths. Please see "Submission Guidelines" for more details.
- Full-length journal article (5,500 - 9,000 words)
- Book review (1,000 - 2,000 words)
- Reflection (250 - 1,000 words)
- Multimedia (audio/video/web/photo essay)
- References: in-text citations and bibliography in Chicago Style
Submission Deadline: October 1, 2023
Issue Release: Spring 2024