Projections 18: Planning for Polycrisis

We live in a time of “polycrisis”: multiple protracted, compounded, and interconnected crises that produce conditions of profound uncertainty, volatility, and fragility in contemporary cities. In Projections 18, we aim to bring together urban scholarship that empirically characterizes and explains aspects of this multiplicity of crises, at varying temporalities, scales, and geographies. We invite scholarship that grapples with what planning practice and study can learn from grounded practices—community-based activism, mutual aid, everyday care, and insurgent practices—to diagnose and negotiate interconnected crises. Recognizing that the term “crisis” is at once discursive, rhetorical, and political, we take a skeptical and reflexive approach to the study and conceptualization of polycrisis. We do not take polycrisis at face value and question the merits and traction of the concept for our work as urban scholars. Moreover, we invite diverse scholarly responses, analytic, pragmatic and normative, on what can be done to address conditions of polycrisis and how planning and planners are situated within conditions of compounded vulnerability.

Building on early definitions of the term as describing interwoven crises, scholars more recently have sought to specify polycrisis in terms of harm, its global scope, and “knotted eventedness” (Lawrence et al. 2024, Henig and Knight 2023). Scholars highlight the need for research on crisis interactions rather than crises in isolation, as well as for textured analyses of polycrisis through thick description and with attention to the multiplicity of social life, historicity, messy temporality, and intersectionality. Projections 18 seeks to highlight these features of polycrisis within grounded, empirical studies of urban life. Urban studies and planning scholars are uniquely positioned to research polycrisis, given our field’s concern not only with compounding social, economic, and ecological crises in cities but with the politics of planning in the public interest. Studies of urban polycrisis inherit this critical lineage and risk recycling uncritical ideas of crisis and vulnerability. We are inspired by David Madden’s  call for research on the polycritical city, which exposes urbanization’s crisis tendencies and uncovers “the political-economic and structural causes of urban immiseration” (Madden 2023, p. 273). In Projections 18, we examine different dimensions of polycrisis and ask how polycrisis originates, who it harms, and how the term is deployed and politicized. What are “emancipatory alternatives” that challenge the systemic roots of polycrisis, mitigate its everyday effects, and transform the co-constitutive relationship between urbanization and crisis (Brenner, 2009, p. 201; Sugrue, 2014)?

Subthemes

In this issue, we invite contributions that engage with one of two sub-themes: (1) Conceptualizing Polycrisis and (2) Navigating and Responding to Polycrisis. Across the two sub-themes, we welcome scholarship that takes a grounded approach and engages with communities, places, cities, and regions across the Global South and North. Given the global and translocal nature of polycrisis, we invite submissions that traverse the North-South dichotomy theoretically and empirically.

Subtheme 1 | Conceptualizing Polycrisis

We invite empirical investigations that explore the form, substance, and mechanisms of polycrisis. What is the analytical purchase (and limit) of polycrisis for understanding the overlapping nature and knotted complexity of urban challenges today? Submissions might respond to one or more animating questions for this sub-theme: What form does a polycrisis take? What and who is in crisis? How do intersecting crises make a polycrisis?

Subtheme 2 | Navigating and Responding to Polycrisis

For subtheme two, we invite submissions that examine grounded practices and experiments by individuals, communities, social movements, and community-based groups to diagnose, navigate, tackle, and respond to polycrisis. Faced with interconnected and compounding crises, at various scales and temporalities, what can we learn from such grounded experiments and practices? What alternative visions, however small-scale or short-lived, do such grounded practices open on what can be done to mitigate conditions of polycrisis?

Author Instructions

For Projections 18, we invite three types of original submissions on the theme of polycrisis:

• Research articles that empirically and theoretically engage one of two subthemes: (1) Conceptualizing Polycrisis and (2) Navigating and Responding to Polycrisis. Academic papers should be between 7,000 and 10,000 words, including title, abstract, figures, tables, and bibliography.
• Notes on praxis that provide grounded case studies on planning in and for polycrisis. Case studies should be between 800 and 1000 words and analyze everyday forms of resistance and negotiation, broader modes of organizing and insurgency, and autonomous practices such as mutual aid or informal care practices.
• Photo essays comprising a series of two to three photos with 250 to 500 words of supportive text, analysis, or captions that introduce the photo series and place the photographs in the context of the two sub-themes. Photographs are welcome to take varied visual approaches to the theme of polycrisis, from capturing the experiences of communities impacted by polycrisis to speculative and imaginative responses to polycrisis. Authors should be the copyright holders of their photographs or have gained permission of reuse.

Co-editors will privilege submissions focused on one of the two sub-themes, along with interdisciplinary research that puts historical conditions in conversation with present and future urban polycrisis. Alongside urban and planning scholars, we seek submissions from scholars in other fields, such as geography, urban sociology, critical development studies, anthropology, history, and political economy, which are often siloed from planning and urban studies scholarship and provide theoretical and empirical insights into compounding social, economic, and ecological crises.

Please submit your abstract online here by midnight on October 5, 2024. Decisions will be shared by the end of September, and full articles must be submitted by December 20, 2024. 

Please address correspondence regarding Projections 18 to all issue editors:

Chen Chu, PhD Student, MIT, chenchu@mit.edu

Chenab Navalkha, PhD Candidate, MIT, chenab@mit.edu

Mrinalini Penumaka, PhD Candidate, MIT, mpenumak@mit.edu

Bibliography

Brenner, N. (2009). What is critical urban theory? City, 13(2–3), 198–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810902996466

Henig, D., & Knight, D. M. (2023). Polycrisis: Prompts for an emerging worldview. Anthropology Today, 39(2), 3–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12793

Lawrence, M., Homer-Dixon, T., Janzwood, S., Rockstöm, J., Renn, O., & Donges, J. F. (2024). Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability, 7, e6. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1

Madden, D. (2023). Polycritical city? City, 27(3–4), 271–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2023.2232682

Sugrue, T. J. (2014). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press.

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