Guest author: Jo Ellis, Blue Kayak and Northumbria University.  We all know that it’s bad to be too fat, don’t we? Voices on every side tell us so, particularly...

AESOP is broad and diverse community of scholars and practitioners at diverse stages in their career(s). The AESOP 2018 conference was a strong, engaged and eng...

Participatory budgeting is increasingly popular among local councils, and is now also adopted by regional and even national governments across the globe. The in...

Article originally published with Linkedin Publishing- in continuance to my previous post - Planning as a profession and course of study : A floundering Planner...

Swacch Bharat? A pan India mission launched with political support at the centre is a novel effort. But to eradicate open defecation from a society whose founda...

The term ‘Development‘ (physical development) may be defined as – carrying out engineering, building, mining, quarrying and other such works in/on/under land. T...

Housing is an important aspect of city development. Population growth in a city is mainly attributed to two main reasons: migration from different areas in sear...

Spatial planning, at its best, can facilitate sustainable development. Planning policies, however, are no silver bullet for the implementation of sustainable de...

One of the last major spatial planning events was the 12th AESOP Young Academics conference, held at the University of Groningen 26-29 March 2018. Following las...

This is the first of two posts about cyborgs: what they are, and how they manifest as the hybrid objects and forms of knowledge that characterise much of place-...

In this post I explore how the notion of User Experience (UX), a key dimension of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), can enhance urban planning. Applying user-ce...

In this blog I explore the value of minimalism for many aspects of our urban lives. I draw parallels between such varied phenomena as urban acupuncture, resourc...

Picture credit: Shopping Trip, by carnagenyc on flickr, Non-Commercial CC Attribution 2.0. “It doesn’t matter what country or what political system you are from...

In early 2013, a freshman post-doc fellow, I was struggling around the idea of creating a research blog. At that time, not many blogs in the field of planning a...

The smart city concept builds on technological and governance innovations to better enable cities to face up to urbanisation challenges, including the ability t...

2016 has been another rich year for the blog of the AESOP Young Academics, with more than 20 posts published on a wide variety of topics (more before). With mor...

The smart city is much discussed as a sustainable urban development model. However, as discussed in former posts on the blog, “smartness” is in the eye of the b...

Figure 1. Transforming codes of understanding water supply from public sector water supply to water ATM 'Water' is understood both as natural resource and publi...

‘Urban metabolism’, ‘resiliency’ and ‘sustainability’ are competing concepts. ‘Sustainability’ is the oldest and more like an umbrella term for the rest. ‘Urban...

Is participatory planning about engaging everyone and making cities inclusive? Or about satisfying those who speak the loudest? These difficult questions affect...