Projections 18: Planning the 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.