Editorial

It is customary for an incoming Managing Editor to introduce herself. In this editorial, therefore, I will introduce myself. Additionally, I want to pause and briefly look into the past to trace the journey made by Planning Theory so far. Building on this, I situate my thoughts about the future of the journal and introduce a new feature for Planning Theory in this editorial.

I was first introduced to Planning Theory back in 2002, by Huw Thomas, the then Managing Editor of the journal and my PhD supervisor at Cardiff University. I had just arrived in the United Kingdom on a Doctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, with an architectural and planning practice background spanning 13 years in India. The year 2002 was also when the ‘new Planning Theory’ was re-launched and labelled as Issue 1 of Volume 1. Its predecessor ‘Planning Theory Newsletter’ founded by Luigi Mazza in 1988 had ceased for a while, and Huw was very much involved in its revival as its Managing Editor. Over 3 years as a PhD student, I watched, through Huw, the struggle to establish the journal in its own right and save it from ‘the imminent threat of a far too premature demise’ (Hillier, 2005: 5). In these early years, the journal was aspiring to provide a forum for academic scholarship for planning theorists. In his opening editorial, Huw therefore unequivocally states ‘in Planning Theory, theory has priority’ (Thomas, 2002: 8). The journal aimed to encourage formal academic scholarship from everywhere, on any theoretical tradition only highlighting rigour as the prime requirement. Alongside, however, it also strove to retain a space for more informal scholarly musings through its non-refereed essays.

In 2005, the year I gained my PhD, the Managing Editorship of Planning Theory shifted to Jean Hillier and the production of the journal itself shifted to Newcastle University. I think of Jean’s managing editorship as a period of consolidation. In her opening editorial, Jean expresses her wish to ‘push forward the boundaries of theorizing relating to planning’ (Hillier, 2005: 5) and encourage new innovative and explorative ideas in planning theory. This was a good agenda for me, and I had the pleasure of working with Jean to publish from my PhD thesis, which was itself a theoretical work examining the philosophical groundings of complexity theory and its relevance to planning practice and thought. I also found myself rather frequently involved in refereeing for the journal. This association from a distance was formalised in 2009, when Jean invited me to join the Editorial Board of the journal which I accepted with great enthusiasm. One of the major achievements under Jean’s stewardship was the indexing of Planning Theory in the Thomas Reuter’s Web of Science index for the first time in 2010. Jean in her editorial at the time rather modestly states,

Our estimation is that Planning Theory will have an impact factor of about 0.47, placing it in the lower third of the planning and development journals evaluated. … My ambition is for the journal to rise in the rankings towards that elusive factor of 1.0. (Hillier, 2011: 3, 4)

I shifted from Cardiff University to Reading University in 2009. In 2011, Michael Gunder became the Managing Editor and the management of the journal shifted to New Zealand. Michael brought an interjection of psychoanalytical thought into planning theory heralded through a special issue that drew on Freud and Lacan. Building on Jean’s and his own stewardship, Michael was able to announce in 2011 an impact factor of 1.219 ranking Planning Theory as the 17 out of 47 in the Planning and Development category, far surpassing expectations. This was also a time when I became involved in teaching and learning at Reading University, launching a new international planning programme with five new modules including one on planning theory and one involving international work placement reflecting both my practice background and my interest in theory. As these new teaching initiatives got established, I was offered the role of Director of Studies for the School of Real Estate and Planning. I also found my way back to writing and refereeing again. So when the opportunity for the Managing Editorship of Planning Theory came up again in 2014, I was ready to put myself forward for consideration and was honoured to be confirmed in the post. I joined as one of the Editors in late 2014, and I have been shadowing Michael through 2015.

In the last Planning Theory Editorial Board meeting in Prague, Ben Davy commented on the need for more dissent, debate and discussion in Planning Theory, sentiments echoed by many on the Editorial Board. The Board consequently decided to launch a new ‘Comments’ section not exceeding 1000 words in total length. The first of these will be published this year. I am also keen to encourage planning theory that draws upon non-Western traditions of thought and promotes theorisation from non-Western contexts while continuing to maintain the development of Western traditions of thought and theorisation. It is my belief that these two worlds on many counts increasingly share a common global world and are now discovering each other in their very own territories. The West and non-West thus need to know more about each other in order to plan within their own contexts.

Finally, as is the convention every year, Michael and I are greatly thankful to those generous people who kindly assess our submitted papers and then write their extremely insightful referee reports. For reviewers who provided reports for decisions made on submitted manuscripts from July 2014 through the end of June 2015, we wish to thank for refereeing Hazem Abu-Orf, Henri Acselrad, Ernest Alexander, Nurit Alfasi, Pia Bäcklund, Guy Baeten, Tribid Banerjee, Claudia Basta, Howell Baum, Robert Beauregard, Geoffrey Binder, Luuk Boelens, Sue Brownhill, Michael Buser, Kang Cao, Angelique Chettiparamb, Benjamin Davy, Gert de Roo, Kim Davey, Mona Fawaz, Antonio Ferreira, Judy Gillespie, Kristina Grange, Kai Gu, Michael Hardman, Jean Hillier, Charles Hoch, Randall Halcombe, Judith Innes, Yosef Jabareen, Erik Jönsson, Vesa Kanninen, Nikhil Kaza, Henk-Jan Kooij, Arnoud Lagendijk, Lawrence Lai, Mickey Lauria, Ferdinand Lewis, Ali Madanipour, Raine Mäntysalo, Jonathan Metzger, Stefano Moroni, Kristina Olesen, Mark Oranje, Gavin Parker, Nicholas Phelps, Francesco Piccolo, John Pløger, Davide Ponzini, Libby Porter, Mark Purcell, Yvonne Rydin, Tore Sager, Bish Sanyal, Yongjun Shin, Aleksandar Slaev, Emma Street, Antti Talvitie, Huw Thomas, Kristof Van Assche, Vanessa Watson, Tanja Winkler and Johan Woltjer.