Decolonizing Planning Perspectives: opportunities for the future

The concept of decolonization has received significant critical attention across academic disciplines, including planning history, leading some scholars to caution against its conceptual stretching. Within Planning Perspectives, a leading journal in Planning History however, the term is relatively absent, signalling opportunities for future content, such as special issues, wider geographical scope, and engagement with multilingualism. Although multiple contributions critically address the colonial origins and legacies of spatial planning models in circulation worldwide, areas that remain under-explored include the impacts of political decolonization on urban settlements in ex-colonial territories, and challenges to colonial epistemologies in research and institutional cultures. We begin this paper by acknowledging our positionalities in relation to colonial legacies before reviewing the journal’s engagement with the intertwined histories of planning, colonialism and decolonization to date. Drawing on our research, we suggest there is scope for greater critical focus on decolonizing agendas in planning history, in the context of wider interdisciplinary debates on the meanings and politics of decolonization, Reparatory Justice, and the legacies of colonialism in spatial planning, development and urban studies worldwide. The paper concludes by proposing five potential avenues for ‘decolonizing’ Planning Perspectives in the future.