Student Projects

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Critical Planning, Volume 26: Just Futures
Deadline for submissions: Dec. 31, 2021
Anticipated publication date: Fall of 2022.

Abolitionists, activists, and artists have long conjured just futures, or visions that serve as alternatives to the unjust social and material conditions of the world. Social movements are galvanized by such visions, which are templates for toppling the carceral, patriarchal, fascist, and other imperial manifestations of power.

Urban planning is always implicated in questions of the future. Indeed, planning has been a preferred tool of the state for realizing its own unjust futures. Planning as extraction, as segregation, as eviction and forced removal, as genocide. These are the outcomes of futuristic visions rooted in what Sonya Renee Taylor has called “white supremacist delusion”¹ and is the legacy that planning must contend with as it simultaneously confronts the ongoing crises of climate change, racial and social injustice, and a global pandemic.

What does planning for just futures look like? Or, put another way, can planning be saved? What are the extant practices of, emerging relationalities within, or alternatives to planning that provide a glimpse of the just world we want to live in, and how to get there? Such questions ask us to think both within the field of planning and beyond it, to undo planning and recreate it. To think about planning for just futures is to think about reimagining planning itself.

In this call for submissions we invite pieces that elucidate and elevate practices of and towards just futures. We are interested in submissions that interrogate the boundaries or limits of planning, whether as a profession, as a field of scholarship, or as an insurgent practice for realizing more just futures. To that end we encourage submissions from multiple disciplines and practices including but not limited to urban planning, history, art, architecture, ethnic studies, gender studies, geography, sociology, or anthropology. We welcome both traditional academic formats as well as multimedia, multisensory submissions.

Possible lines of exploration include:

• Alternative planning practices and alternatives to planning
• Racial justice and social equity
• Indigenous sovereignty
• Feminist and queer futures
• Collective grief and healing
• Solidarity economies
• Practices of hope
• Climate change
• Community resilience
• Intersectionality
• Belonging and community ownership
• Unlearning
• Multispecies justice and more-than-human futures
• Reimagining public health
• Alternative methodologies and ways of knowing
• Abolition

Instructions for authors

Critical Planning Journal (CPJ) is a double-blind peer-reviewed publication. Submissions should be original (not published elsewhere). CPJ accepts various submission formats including, but not limited to, academic articles, fiction, poetry, manifestos, and personal essays. We also welcome multi-media submissions, including photographs, maps, art, or design projects related to the call above. We encourage submissions that incorporate cross-disciplinary, multi-scalar, multi-sited, transnational, or mixed-method approaches. If you wish to submit a photograph to be considered for the volume’s cover, please indicate so in your submission.

Submissions should include a cover sheet and an anonymized manuscript. Your cover sheet should include the title of your piece, your full name, institutional affiliation (if any), phone number, email address and a two-sentence biographical statement. Academic articles should generally be between 5,000 and 7,000 words. Submissions should not exceed 7,000 words including notes, bibliographic references, and in-text citations. All academic submissions should be written according to the standards of the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition (author-date style). Cite references in the text by name and year in parentheses. Please refer to the Chicago Manual of Style Online Citation Guide. We highly recommend using a citation management program (e.g. Zotero, Endnote, Mendeley) to maintain consistency. Please double-space all parts of the manuscript and leave one-inch margins on all sides. Images should be provided in .TIF format, not to exceed a width of 5 inches and a resolution of 600 dpi (a width of 3000 pixels).

The Editorial Collective behind CPJ Volume 26 is managing a multilingual review process. We will accept submissions in any language, pending the availability of fluent reviewers. If you are hoping to make a submission in any non-English language, we ask that you contact the editors in advance regarding our capacity to review in that language.

Submissions are due by December 31, 2021. To submit, please visit https://escholarship.org/uc/uclaspa_criticalplanning and follow the link and instructions on the right side of the screen (you will be asked to create an account). We expect to publish CPJ Volume 26 in Fall of 2022.

For more information, please email Emma French at emmafrench@ucla.edu or Gus Wendel at gwendel1583@ucla.edu.

¹ Sonya Renee Taylor’s Instagram page, accessed September 25, 2021