The Volume 33 Call for Papers is now open through October 1st!

Invitation for Submissions to a Special Issue: Publics/Counterpublics

Planning as a discipline and a practice has derived its legitimacy from acting in the name of the “public.” Depending on context this has fallen between identifying a broader public interest through technical expertise and interpreting a popular will through participation and accountability. Planners cannot progress without re-thinking the concept of an unmarked public that can hide social asymmetries, naturalize its differential impacts, or present the interests of one group as the interests of the whole. Can the public still represent a collective political project and a normative aspiration for planning, in the face of the privatization and co-optation of institutions by unaccountable interests? With the 40th anniversary of the Berkeley Planning Journal, we are soliciting journal articles, book reviews, reflections, and multimedia submissions from a broad array of planners and urbanists to explore the current state of the “public” in planning, its limitations as well as its new interpretations and possibilities for the contemporary moment.

Black studies and queer theory develop concepts of counterpublics: spaces of resistance, contestation, conflict, and deviation against and in the process of public formation (Warner, 2002). As Cathy Cohen (2004) writes, counterpublics are spaces “where not only oppositional ideas and discourse happen, but lived opposition, or at least autonomy, is chosen daily.” What counterpublics have arisen within or in response to the planning processes? How should the planning academy recognize the politics of refusal and illegibility of the “undercommons” inside and outside of the academy (Moten and Harney, 2013)?

A pragmatist approach questions the limits of the public: who constitutes a public through collective inquiry on common problems, how and when a public arises, and to what effect? This unsettles the imperial claim planning makes to represent the public, while opening radical and sometimes contradictory forms of interpreting and serving these democratic multiplicities (Lake 2017). It also invites planning academia to open the scientific community of planning. 

Issue Release (planned): Spring 2024

Instructions for Authors

In the inaugural 1984 Berkeley Planning Journal, Hilda Blanco wrote that one of the defining characteristics of Berkeley planning was a “social conscience, expressed in its early rejection of the plan­ning profession as merely technical expertise, its critical attitude towards established institutions, and its strong advocacy for social justice.” We especially encourage contributions in this spirit; that bridge planning theory, technique, critique, and practice; that center issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, migration, and marginality in planning; that work across topics and subfields. Submissions can take a number of forms:

• Abstracts: 150–200 words

• Full-length journal article (5,500 - 9,000 words, including title, abstract, and bibliography)

• Book review (1,000 - 2,000 words)

• Multimedia (video/audio/web)

• Reflection (250 - 1,000 words)

• References: in-text citations and bibliography in Chicago Style

Papers are subject to a peer-review process. Manuscripts have to be original (not published elsewhere).

Submitting to the Journal

Our call for journal papers is generally focused around a theme. We will also consider high quality papers related to planning and urbanism, and which are submitted outside a call, for publication in our next volume. Please visit our eScholarship page to make a submission.

Our publication process typically takes about 10 months. Submissions will be received until October 1. Our editorial team reviews and assigns manuscripts to peer reviewers in October. Reviewers are requested to submit a first review within 45 days. Once all reviews are received, our editor will return them with a decision on paper publication. If publication is recommended contingent on major revisions, revised manuscripts will be due February 1. Layout and final editorial preparations are completed through the early spring, with the goal of publishing by the end of March. Editorial holdups, including delayed reviews and resubmissions, can extend this timeline, but our editorial team does its best to stay on schedule. If you have submitted a manuscript and have questions about the timeline, please reach out to the editor using the form on Contact page.

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