World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC) 2026 ① Opening — "Peripheral Visions" and the Digital Transformation of Planning

The 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026) opened on June 29, 2026, in Espoo and Helsinki, Finland. It is the largest academic congress in the field, bringing together planning schools from around the world once every five years, and this year it was jointly hosted by Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, and Tampere University. This article is the first installment of a four-part series compiling the plenary sessions livestreamed one-way on Vimeo throughout the congress, together with on-site observations.

Once every five years, the planning academy gathers

WPSC is a congress jointly organized by the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN) and 11 continental member associations. It has been held on a five-year cycle since its inaugural edition in Shanghai in 2001, and this Helsinki congress marks the sixth.

[Table 1] Overview of the 6th WPSC 2026 (Source: WPSC 2026 official website wpsc2026.org, Aalto University event page, GPEAN)

[Table 2] WPSC hosting history (5-year cycle) (Source: GPEAN History)

This year's congress theme, "Peripheral Visions," asks whether planning can still build a just and livable world amid the pressures of climate crisis, populism, and global economic forces. It calls for rethinking planning from the vantage point of the periphery rather than the center.

Opening keynote — UN-Habitat Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach

At 4:00 p.m. on the first day, the opening plenary session opened the congress. The star speaker was UN-Habitat Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach. An economist with more than 20 years of experience in housing, informal settlements, and urban policy, she was appointed Executive Director at the Under-Secretary-General level by the UN General Assembly in 2024. Having confronted the global housing crisis and informal settlements head-on throughout her career, her opening keynote made clear that the congress theme of the "periphery" is fundamentally a matter of global urban inequality.

Opening plenary streaming: vimeo.com/event/5991823 (Mon, June 29, 16:00) · Following keynote: vimeo.com/event/5991898 (Mon, June 29, 17:45)

First-day academic keynote — "Democracy, technocracy, or techno-determinism?"

Following the opening, the academic keynote session brought together Finnish planning scholars. Titled "Democracy, technocracy or techno-determinism? — Insights into the digitalisation of planning in Finland," it featured three speakers: Hanna Mattila (University of Turku), Pilvi Nummi (Aalto University), and Eveliina Harsia-Mikkola (Aalto University).

The session posed a single question: "How can planning be democratic, inclusive, and responsive in a rapidly changing world?" It was an occasion for Finland, one of the most digitalized countries in the world, to take a critical look at its own digital transformation of planning.

The National Planning Information Model and machine-readable planning

At the heart of the presentation was the digital transformation now underway. Finland is replacing its existing land use and building legislation with a system (the RYHTI system) requiring all plans to be produced in the format of a National Planning Information Model. Overseen by the Ministry of the Environment, it mandates that all new land use plans be published in machine-readable form by the end of 2028. Planning regulations and guidance must be machine-readable, selected from predefined code lists. Planners must now rethink the content of planning "through the information model."

Is the information model a tool that "supports" planning, or has it begun to "drive" planning itself? — This was the question the session held onto until the end.

Reading the phenomenon through three concepts

The speakers diagnosed this phenomenon through three concepts: democracy, technocracy, and techno-determinism.

[Table 3] Three concepts presented in the first-day academic keynote (Source: WPSC 2026 opening-day academic keynote "Democracy, technocracy or techno-determinism?", June 29, 2026)

Interviews with 13 experts surfaced concrete voices from the field: that planners and IT experts are split into "two worlds" without a shared language; that the demand for open, accessible data collides with pressures for security and privacy that call for closing it off; and the self-critical observation that well-trained planners end up spending their time on metadata and system architecture rather than on core work such as interaction, deliberation, and design.

Conclusion — technology is not neutral

The message the speakers delivered to policymakers was clear: technology is never neutral, and it changes the process and the goals themselves. They argued that digital transformation should not be pursued separately from reform of the planning system, but carried out together with reform of land use planning — only then can the promise of "greater efficiency and greater democracy" be fulfilled.

Questions for Seoul

Korea, too, is rapidly pushing forward the digital transformation of its spatial information and urban planning information systems. So the questions raised in this session are not someone else's story. If data and AI are to "support" planning without "replacing" it, how should equity and deliberation be designed into the process alongside efficiency? On its first day, Helsinki seemed to already show, in its urban space, a city center full of pedestrians and green trams — a balance between technology and people.

The next installment (②) will cover the three keynotes of the University of Helsinki plenary that directly engaged the congress theme "Peripheral Visions" — a comprehensive history of Chinese urbanization, the digital and future transition, and the new geopolitics of planning.

Sources for the plenary content in this article: WPSC 2026 plenary Vimeo streams (vimeo.com/event/5991823 · 5991898) and on-site observation notes. Congress overview and keynote speaker information from official materials by wpsc2026.org, Aalto University, and GPEAN.

2026 World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC) ② Three Perspectives — History, Future, and Geopolitics at the University of Helsinki Plenary

This is the second installment in the series on the 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026). The morning plenary on Wednesday, July 1 was held not at Aalto University's Otaniemi campus but at the University of Helsinki Main Building Great Hall, facing Senate Square in the city center. Fitting the congress's overarching theme, "Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Planning," that day's plenary unfolded three major perspectives in turn: China's urbanization, the future and transition, and the new geopolitics of planning.

A 200-Year-Old Neoclassical Hall Becomes a Forum for the World's Planning Scholars

The keynotes were held in the University of Helsinki's Main Building, which Carl Ludvig Engel built alongside the cathedral and government palace when he designed the Senate Square area in neoclassical style. In the Great Hall, tall Corinthian columns line the walls and a wooden podium carved with gilded motifs stands at the center of the stage — a symbolic space where the university's formal ceremonies, such as degree conferrals, are held. True to a congress that registered some 1,500 participants from 62 countries, seats and even the stairways were filled with attendees well before the opening.

First, here is a summary of the congress's confirmed keynote speakers.

[Table 1] WPSC 2026 Plenary Keynote Speakers (Source: Aalto University official event page)

Streaming of this day's plenary: vimeo.com/event/5991925 (7.1 Wed 09:00) · vimeo.com/event/5991927 (7.1 Wed 10:45)

① China's Urbanization and the Evolution of Planning — LIU Jian (Tsinghua University)

Professor LIU Jian (劉健) of Tsinghua University's School of Architecture, in his keynote "Coordinating for Consensus on High-Quality Development: Planning in China," offered a historical survey spanning three millennia of Chinese planning tradition up to the present day. He began with the traditional-era principle whereby the capital's spatial composition symbolized and centralized power according to the natural topography of mountains and rivers together with ritual propriety (禮制) and feng shui, then traced the transplantation of modern planning institutions through the treaty ports and concessions of the mid-19th century, the Soviet-aided, danwei (單位)-centered urban fabric of the socialist industrialization period of the 1950s, and the hyper-rapid urbanization since reform and opening that has absorbed more than ten million rural-to-urban migrants every year.

The narrative went on to touch the rise of megacity clusters such as Jing-Jin-Ji and the Yangtze/Pearl River Delta; the 2019 integration reform of territorial spatial planning (國土空間規劃) and the ecological protection red line (the "1.8 billion mu farmland red line"); urban regeneration that revived landfills and steel mills as parks; the participatory community planner system and the 15-minute living area standard; and, further, the shift from "growth to high-quality development" amid aging and climate change, along with the challenge of shrinking cities in the northeast. What stood out was his attention both to planning's public role in "defining and solving problems" and to the accompanying challenges of central–local relations, metropolitan coordination, and social segregation.

② Digital and Sustainable Transition, and the Long View of Planning — The Neuvonen Panel

The second session was a panel titled "Redefining the Future of Planning: Digital Advances," focused on digital and sustainable transition. Chair Aleksi Neuvonen (Demos Helsinki) defined planning as "the practice of translating imaginaries about the future into present action," and laid out the tensions embedded in this age of transition: that although green growth is proclaimed, there is no global evidence of a decoupling between growth and ecological burden; that although justice is raised as a banner, justice too easily remains a slogan rather than an "effect"; and that AI promises hyper-productivity while simultaneously threatening loss of control and upheaval in employment.

He distilled this unease into two concepts: James Bridle's "New Dark Age" (the more layers of technology accumulate, the more unpredictable the future becomes) and "cruel optimism" (the breakthrough of transition is always said to be "two steps ahead," yet the future keeps receding). To avoid the trap of "no future," he argued, a positive vision is needed, and proposed backcasting and scenario methods that define a "family of desirable futures" and trace the path back to the present as a solution.

In the panel discussion that followed, one speaker proposed "ethics of care" as a planning principle, arguing that "what matters is not the volume of data but what values we assign to that data." Another panelist argued that AI is less a machine ruling the world than something that "makes us behave more and more like AI (i.e., become coded)," and that the fundamental question for planning is "whether we can safeguard authentic human experience." One panelist's answer to the chair's Camus-inflected question — "Is planning worth doing?" — lingered long after.

"Planning is inherently human. Because looking ahead to the future and contemplating the world is part of human nature, we cannot stop planning."

③ The New Geopolitics of Planning — Globalization 2.0 (Bayırbağ, METU)

The third keynote, "The New Geocortex of Planning — Globalization 2.0, Emergency Diagnostics and Transformational Planning," shook up the tenor of the session the most. Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ (Middle East Technical University) called his own talk "a kind of collective therapy for reflecting together," and redefined planning as both a psychological and cognitive need to reduce uncertainty and, essentially, a spatial and political activity.

His core diagnosis was that problems and the targets of intervention no longer stay within fixed administrative jurisdictions but have become "moving targets" — moving people, information, services, and problems — which renders existing planning, anchored in fixed jurisdictions, powerless. Accordingly, he argued, the nation-state is not disappearing but is being reorganized into a vast "governance matrix," and what actually drives this matrix are informal networks and "network managers." He warned that the closer one stands to the center of that matrix, the more other governments come to depend on that actor, fueling the rise of strongman politics and one-man rule, and left the challenge that since networks do not democratize themselves, one must be organized well enough to enter and reshape them.

One Shared Direction Across Three Keynotes

[Table 2] Summary of the Three Keynotes at the University of Helsinki Plenary (Source: WPSC 2026 plenary streams vimeo.com/event/5991925·5991927 and on-site observation, 2026.7.1)

The three keynotes differed in texture but pointed in one direction: do not separate efficiency (technology and data) from democracy (equity and deliberation). It was a message directly transferable to Seoul's digital transition of its urban planning information system, the accessibility equity of the N-minute living-area city, and data- and AI-based planning support systems.

The next installment (③) will cover the paper sessions (Zoom Track) and the GPEAN Best Paper, along with the living-area optimal-allocation research on "balancing efficiency and equity" presented on that very stage.

Sources for the plenary content in this article: WPSC 2026 plenary Vimeo streams (vimeo.com/event/5991925 · 5991927) and on-site observation notes. Keynote speaker information from Aalto University official materials.

World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC) 2026 ③ Efficiency and Equity — Paper Sessions, Best Paper, and Shrinking and Growing Cities

This is the third installment in the series on the 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026). If the plenary posed the congress's big questions, the paper sessions were the stage where actual research met the test. The paper sessions were also streamed online via Zoom Track A and B, and one could move freely between the two tracks. On Tuesday, June 30, I stood on that stage in the Track 1 (Accessibility & Mobility) session and gave an oral presentation on "Balancing Efficiency and Equity."

Paper Sessions and Best Paper — Another Axis of the Congress

This year's congress was organized around numerous general tracks, special sessions, and roundtables, with paper sessions running in parallel at the Aalto University Otaniemi campus. Among them, GPEAN traditionally selects and awards a Best Congress Paper, and this year too a separate Best Paper session was scheduled for the plenary on the morning of Thursday, July 2.

[Table 1] Online participation links for plenary and paper sessions (Source: WPSC 2026 pre-congress guidance (Eva Purkarthofer))

Tue 6.30 plenary streaming: vimeo.com/event/5991907 (09:00) · vimeo.com/event/5991917 (11:00) · Paper sessions via the Zoom Track A·B links above

Why This Problem, Why Now — An Asymmetric Crisis

The presentation was titled "Balancing Efficiency and Equity in Walkable Living Areas — Optimised Amenity Placement under Demographic Change." It concerns a planning-support module that uses linear programming (LP) to solve the question of "where to cut and where to add" community amenities when shrinking and growing cities coexist within a single city.

Korea is undergoing the fastest demographic transition in the OECD. Total population turned to decline in 2020, and the problem is that this decline is not uniform within cities. Living areas in old town centers are aging and shrinking, while outer new towns are growing rapidly. Planners face two opposite questions at once: "where should facilities be consolidated to save budget" and "where should facilities be added to make walking accessibility equitable." With the 2024 revision of the National Land Planning Act making living-area plans a statutory plan, this question entered the institutional framework.

Busan as the Testbed — A Four-Layer Planning-Support Module

Busan contains the full spectrum of demographic trajectories within a single city. The 770 km² area, population of 3.3 million, and six mid-level living areas were divided into 19,469 250-meter grid cells, with 3,979 facilities across 16 amenity types analyzed. Gangseo and Gijang are growing, Dongnae and Haeundae are stable, and Gangdong and the old town center are shrinking. Because growth and decline coexist, it was an ideal stage for testing opposite prescriptions with a single module.

The key point is that four layers share the same pipeline. A multimodal walking and transit network (Layer 1), 2SFCA accessibility diagnostics (Layer 2), living-area delineation based on Louvain community detection (Layer 3), and linear programming optimization (Layer 4) all run on a single reproducible open-source pipeline.

Two LP Models — Efficiency and Equity

[Table 2] Two optimization models for efficiency and equity (Source: Choi Junyoung et al., WPSC 2026 Track 1 presentation, 2026.6.30)

The two models are selected automatically according to each area's demographic trajectory tag. On the same pipeline, under opposite demographic phases, shrinking areas consolidate while growing areas expand.

[Table 3] Busan empirical results (Source: Choi Junyoung et al., WPSC 2026 Track 1 presentation, 2026.6.30)

The key point is that efficiency (cost savings) and equity (improved accessibility for the bottom tier) improved together rather than trading off. Model B showed a Pareto improvement, lifting the floor without cutting the top-performing areas.

What Was Confirmed on the International Stage

In the discussion following the presentation, attention centered on the value, for public deliberation and resident participation, of the "audit trail" that LP-based optimization leaves behind — documented grounds for why each facility is opened or closed. In fact, in the Gangdong pilot, 2 of the 3 closures proposed by the LP matched the outcome of expert review in the 2025 living-area plan, and the one case that diverged was itself meaningful, in that it revealed "documented grounds" in place of "implicit preference."

This research connects directly with the question posed by the opening day's keynote address — how to embed both efficiency and equity together so that data supports planning without replacing it. Data and optimization are merely tools that make such choices transparent; the question of what kind of city to leave behind remains the task of planning itself.

Presenter: Choi Junyoung (The Seoul Institute) · Co-authors: Eom Seonyong (Hanyang University) · Yeo Jiho (Gachon University) · Lee Yuri (The Seoul Institute) / WPSC 2026 Helsinki · Track 1 (Accessibility & Mobility) · 2026.6.30

The next installment (④) will bring together the closing plenary, the green-transition regional planning covered in the congress's mobile workshop, and the implications of the congress as a whole for Seoul metropolitan-area planning.

Sources for this article: WPSC 2026 paper sessions (Zoom Track A·B) and plenary streaming (vimeo.com/event/5991907 · 5991917 · 5991930), on-site presentation and observation notes.

2026 World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC) ④ Rethinking Planning — The Closing Plenary, the Green-Transition Regional Plan, and What It Leaves for Seoul

This is the final installment of the series on the 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026). The five days of plenary sessions concluded with the closing plenary on the afternoon of Friday, July 3. This installment brings together the closing session and awards, the green-transition regional plan featured in the Congress's mobile workshop, and the implications the Congress as a whole leaves for planning in Seoul and the capital region.

The Closing Plenary — Awards and the Next Host City

The closing plenary is where the Congress's achievements are gathered, awards such as Best Paper are presented, and the next step for the academic network is confirmed. Since WPSC has convened every five years since Shanghai in 2001, the 7th Congress is slated for 2031. The closing keynote returned to the entire academic community the question posed by the Congress's overarching theme, "Peripheral Visions" — whether planning can still build a just and livable world under the pressures of the climate crisis, inequality, and geopolitics.

Closing plenary streaming: vimeo.com/event/5991955 (Fri, July 3, 16:00)

A Live Proving Ground Set Up by the Congress — The Green-Transition Regional Plan (VISION)

If the plenary sessions were discourse, Mobile Workshop MW13, "Regional Planning for the Green Transition," held on the afternoon of July 1, was practice. Planning experts from around the world conducted impact assessment and international peer review on the draft regional plan "VISION — Thematic Regional Land-Use Plan for Innovative Green Transition," currently being developed by the Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council.

Uusimaa is the capital region of southern Finland encompassing Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa, with a population of roughly 1.8 million (31% of Finland's total) and 39% of its GDP. The core principle of the VISION plan is "growing inwards, not outwards." Rather than expanding into the periphery, it intensifies existing urban areas and infrastructure, strengthening strong centers, public transit, walking and cycling networks, ecological networks, and renewable energy. The goals are ambitious — a population of up to 2.2 million by 2050, and carbon negativity following climate neutrality in 2030.

The highlight of the methodology is its four cross-cutting themes. They serve as an "auditor," evaluating and auditing planning solutions across the six sectoral themes — energy, nature, industry, water, logistics, and defense — within a single sustainable green-transition framework.

[Table 1] The Four Cross-Cutting Themes of the VISION Plan (Source: WPSC 2026 MW13 workshop background material — Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council, 2026)

The standout element was a visualization tool called the "Impact Assessment Flower." It expresses the degree to which each of the six themes contributes to a given cross-cutting theme through the color and grade of its petals, making relationships and trade-offs "visible" rather than simply listing sectors side by side. Placing the flower for mitigation next to the flower for adaptation reveals at a glance that adaptation is weaker than mitigation.

The Plan Made Tangible Through a Site Visit — Jätkäsaari

The principles confirmed through discourse and the workshop carried through into tangible form at Helsinki's regeneration site. Jätkäsaari, the former West Harbour, is a 20-year long-term project transforming roughly 100 hectares of container port into a "maritime urban core" combining housing, offices, waterfront parks, and trams. About one-fifth of the total area has been developed as parks and green space, and the tram was laid from the outset as the city's skeletal structure rather than added later as an afterthought. The transformation of a once-closed shoreline into an open waterfront connected by promenades and cycling paths was the fullest realization of the principles of "growing inwards" and "walkable neighborhood units."

What the Congress Leaves for Seoul and the Capital Region

Stringing together the five days of plenaries, workshops, and site visits, the Congress leaves the following for planning in Seoul and the capital region.

[Table 2] Implications of WPSC 2026 for Planning in Seoul and the Capital Region (Source: Synthesis of WPSC 2026 plenary sessions and the MW13 workshop, 2026)

The question posed by the Congress's overarching theme, "Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Planning," ultimately converged on one point: do not separate efficiency (technology and data) from democracy (equity and deliberation). Data does not replace judgment — it only makes the grounds for judgment more solid. And for that judgment to be democratic, people, not systems, must remain at the center of planning. The question to be asked again at the 7th Congress five years from now is one Helsinki was already answering through its urban space.

Sources for this article: WPSC 2026 closing plenary streaming (vimeo.com/event/5991955), MW13 "Regional Planning for the Green Transition" workshop background material (Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council, 2026), and on-site observation and field visit records.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detailed Record ① Opening Plenary, Questioning the Digital Transformation of Planning

This is the first installment in a series that transcribes the online streaming (Vimeo) of the 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026) to provide a detailed record of the eight plenary sessions. The first installment covers the opening plenary held at 16:00 on Monday, June 29, 2026, at the Aalto University main hall (Aalto Sali). It captures 90 minutes spanning the opening welcome address, a report on the doctoral workshop, an introduction to a special issue, the first keynote lecture "Democracy, Technocracy or Technodeterminism," and an audience roundtable discussion.

Opening Welcome: The First Congress Held in Europe

The opening welcome address was delivered by Hossam Hewidy, Vice Chair of the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) and professor of urban planning at Aalto University. He emphasized that this was a meaningful occasion, as WPSC was being hosted by European universities for the first time. He noted that the close cooperation among three universities — Aalto, the University of Helsinki, and Tampere University — together with the support of four cities (Espoo, Helsinki, Vantaa, and Tampere), had made this congress possible. He also signaled that the question running through this congress would be how planning can be democratic and inclusive in a rapidly changing world.

Doctoral Workshop Retrospective: Young Researchers Thinking About the Future

Next, Rina Lundman of Tampere University looked back on the doctoral workshop (June 26–29) held in Tampere ahead of the main congress. The key points follow.

- 57 doctoral students from over 20 countries participated. The workshop shared the same theme as the main congress: "Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Planning."

- The central theme was not only space but also the dimension of time — futures. The underlying idea was that there is no better group than students and doctoral candidates to discuss planning for the future.

- Hanna Mattila delivered a keynote on "the periphery," Peter Rache (Radboud University) on "vision," and philosopher Herman on "rethinking in planning." Aleksi Neuvonen gave a talk using "hydrogen imaginaries" in Finland's Pori region as a case study.

- As a preparatory assignment, each group held an online "kitchen table" citizen panel to discuss urban democracy in their respective hometowns and presented the results as posters. A field trip around Tampere was also held, covering the new tram line, the Amuri worker housing district undergoing regeneration, and the view from Pispala hill.

Special Issue Introduction: "Spotlight Finland"

Congress coordinator Eva Purkarthofer introduced the special issue "Spotlight Finland: Contemporary Challenges in Planning Practice and Urban Development," forthcoming this autumn in Transactions of AESOP, the journal of the Association of European Schools of Planning. Her remarks captured the essence of the Finnish stage.

Finland is peripheral in many respects, yet it has made headlines as the world's happiest country and one of Europe's most sustainable cities. While it is portrayed as a nation of welfare, equity, democracy, and tolerance, populism, neoliberal politics, and market logic are also strongly present in Finnish politics and planning.

Purkarthofer pointed out that disparities in wealth, jobs, and population between core regions and the periphery generate political tension and governance challenges. She added that while Finland has been innovative in citizen participation, digital technology, and urban experimentation, the planning field itself suffers from overload and marginalization. The special issue will be published as fully open access.

Keynote Lecture: "Democracy, Technocracy or Technodeterminism"

The first keynote was delivered jointly by three Finnish planning scholars. Hanna Mattila (Director of the Urban Studies Programme, University of Turku) studies planning theory, democracy, justice, and planning law. Pilvi Nummi (postdoctoral researcher, Aalto University) works on the digitalization of planning and citizen participation. Eveliina Harsia-Mikkola (urban planner for the City of Porvoo and a recent Aalto University PhD) studies everyday planning practice and democratic culture. What connects the three is that they bridge theory and practice. The lecture critically dissects the digital transformation of planning in Finland, one of the most digitalized countries in the world.

A Nation of Engineers: The History of the "Technostructure" (Hanna Mattila)

Hanna Mattila opened her lecture by welcoming the audience to Finland, but noting that they had arrived in a country that believes in technology and loves engineering. This identity stems from a history in which engineers stepped to the forefront at every moment of crisis.

- After World War II, Finland was a poor agrarian country that had to pay reparations to the Soviet Union while rebuilding destroyed infrastructure and housing. That necessity drove industrialization and urbanization.

- Urbanization came late but was highly efficient from the 1960s onward. Johanna Hankonen (1994) called this the "technostructure," a fusion of engineers with administrative and financial elites — a concept borrowed from John Kenneth Galbraith.

- The role of prominent architects was secondary, and urbanization was above all a matter of efficiency and function. Governance was corporatist: interest groups participated, but there was no citizen participation in today's sense.

- The recession of the 1990s, compounded by the collapse of the Soviet Union, was severe, but Finland overcame it quickly through a Nokia-driven knowledge economy and digitalization. That legacy is today's high digital infrastructure and IT capability. Since the 2008 financial crisis, growth has stagnated, with the construction industry in particularly deep decline. The government now views digitalization as the key solution in its ongoing planning law reform.

- The planning law reform of the late 1990s made citizen participation mandatory in all public planning processes, but the formal requirements were loose. Finland developed participatory GIS to gather data on preferences and needs, but this differed in character from communicative planning theory oriented toward deliberation.

The National Planning Information Model (PIM) and the RYHTI System (Pilvi Nummi)

Pilvi Nummi first noted that the current digital transformation is being driven by the central government (the Ministry of the Environment). In the past, municipalities set their own tools and formats autonomously, but now the law requires all plans to be produced in an interoperable information model format.

- This initiative is named RYHTI (pronounced "ryuhti"), a Finnish word meaning "an upright, proper posture," implying that planning is being straightened out and put in order. It began in 2020, and the Ministry of the Environment's vision is to build a sustainable living environment grounded in world-class knowledge by 2030.

- The core of the approach is interoperability. Adopting the European Interoperability Framework, this has been implemented in urban planning as the National Planning Information Model (PIM). All municipalities and regions must comply with PIM, which guarantees semantic interoperability — meaning that the meaning of information does not change as it moves between actors or systems. Standard formats and machine interoperability are also addressed.

- The RYHTI system is a national information system for built environment data, and by law all new land-use plans must be published in RYHTI. The transition period runs until the end of 2028 (the slide indicated 2029), and the government is funding municipalities to adapt their tools while testing usability through nationwide joint development. Intentions toward automation and efficiency through AI are also apparent.

- A decisive change is that planning regulations must be machine-readable in structure, with values to be selected primarily from predefined code lists. Free text is still possible but should be converted into codes wherever feasible.

In other words, planners must now rethink the content of plans through the information model, and perhaps even fit their plans to the model.

Yet the information model was designed by carrying over existing practices as they are, rather than rethinking from a planning perspective what will actually be needed in the future. Moreover, Finland has accumulated at least eight kinds of planning tools and four kinds of municipal systems over decades, so the transition generates inertia, path dependency, and rising costs. Tools are sometimes reshaped to fit RYHTI, which Nummi diagnosed as a deterministic development in which the digital artifact strongly drives the process.

Three Concepts, and 13 Interviews (Hanna Mattila)

Hanna Mattila laid out the concepts of the analytical framework. Democracy is the power of the people or elected representatives, commonly contrasted with technocracy, the power of technical experts. In complex modern societies, substantial delegation to experts is unavoidable, so technocracy itself is not an alarm bell. The key, as John Forester put it, is to distinguish problems that can be solved with expert knowledge from those that require public value choices. Added to this is techno-determinism — in its extreme form, a state in which technical artifacts, rather than people, dictate the direction of development.

The analysis drew on interviews with 13 experts. Focusing on democracy, participation, and RYHTI development, it asked how participants understood democracy and participation, who is driving the transition, and whether the transition is merely a matter of tools or is changing the goals of planning itself.

Findings: Two Technocratic Worlds (Eveliina Harsia-Mikkola)

The key finding was two technocratic worlds that meet but do not understand each other.

- Views diverged on whether RYHTI is a mere tool or a reform. They also diverged on whether standardized regulations and classifications would rigidify planning — particularly harming creativity in regional and comprehensive planning — or would simply demand a new kind of creativity. Above all, a fundamental question was raised: is the information model beginning to drive planning itself?

- Planners and IT experts meet in workshops but lack a common language. One interviewee's remark captures this.

"The consultant speaks only in the language of the information model, which I cannot handle." "We are drowning in data, but there is no one who understands both what exists and what is needed for decision-making."

- Concern was raised about depoliticization: systems are being designed based solely on technical feasibility, without a foundation for understanding planning as a political and deliberative process, blurring the role of political decision-making.

- There is a paradox in citizen accessibility. The information model environment is alienating for citizens. Increasing accessibility requires data to be open, but security and geopolitics push toward keeping data closed. There is almost no public discussion of where the line between security and democratic values should be drawn.

- Planners see themselves as gatekeepers of data and worry about misuse, disinformation, and the spread of so-called "alternative facts." It was also suggested that there may be a shift toward more selective, populist use of data, in which decision-makers cherry-pick convenient data while bypassing planners who take a holistic view.

- Planners' time is also an issue. One interviewee asked rhetorically whether it made sense that a well-trained planner spends 90% of working hours configuring metadata for some digital system, noting that this reduces time for core work such as interaction, deliberation, and design.

Conclusion: Technology Is Never Neutral (Hanna Mattila)

Synthesizing the findings, Mattila stated firmly that technology is never neutral and is never free of values. RYHTI opens some data and increases transparency, but for security reasons, and as development is handed over to the private sector and becomes a black box, it can in fact erode transparency. Path dependency is also clear, as past decisions narrow today's choices. Above all, the planning expertise built up over a generation of communication and deliberation is under threat. Expertise such as place-based judgment, work embedded in cultural context, and the facilitation of democratic debate risks being replaced by data analysis and pushed to the periphery. Her recommendation was therefore clear.

Digitalization still holds the promise of democratizing planning. But this process must go hand in hand with reform of the planning system as a whole. Only if traditional land-use planning (zoning) is also reformed can the promise of greater efficiency and greater democracy be kept.

Mattila closed her lecture by invoking Jürgen Habermas, who passed away last March at age 96, through an opening quotation from Frank Fischer's book "Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise" (1990).

Amid the arrival of AI, we must ask again whether, and how, people can still steer development.

Roundtable: Discussion with the Audience

The discussion that followed the keynote was the highlight of this opening plenary. The moderator opened by asking whether power ultimately resides with machines or with people, and how this should be reflected in education, prompting a series of pointed questions from participants around the world.

- On the education question, Mattila replied that in Finland, planning and planning education are peripheral issues, contrasting this with Denmark, where urban planning is central. Nummi answered that practitioner training is skewed toward tool use, but university students need to be taught new ways of thinking that go beyond tools.

- Honey Kumar, a geography doctoral student from India, asked what a healthy mix of technocracy and democracy would look like, given that people are not always right. Mattila answered that people are not always right when they decide independent of expert knowledge. She said that in an age of populism, experts need to give citizens information all the more, and that systems like RYHTI represent a new possibility for opening data to citizens — though she added that data carries culture with it, so facilitation is needed.

- A participant from Aalto University asked whether the conclusion sounded like nostalgia for the traditional planner, and whether digitalization was simply being blamed. The point was that planners have always relied on the legitimacy of evidence and data. Mattila replied that in Finland this overlaps with the problem of an already overloaded, small cadre of planners. She explained that the point was not that the two forms of expertise universally compete, but that the ideal is for the two worlds to talk and combine — though the interviews had clearly surfaced the negative aspects.

- A participant from Kassel University of Applied Sciences argued that digitalization and democracy are contradictory, criticizing that a strong system had already been built while citizens were given only a playground. Citizens, the participant said, need to understand data science and have the right to know what is open and what is closed. Nummi responded that the real problem is that there is no public discussion at all about what should be opened and what should be closed.

- A participant from TU Delft suggested instead viewing the citizen "playground" as an opportunity: new tools and AI create opportunities for participation by more actors, including NGOs and developers, collaborative platforms, and citizen education. Harsia-Mikkola acknowledged the opportunity but pointed to the significant resource problem — activist groups in large cities have the capacity to handle data and algorithms, but citizens in smaller cities have neither the organization nor the resources.

- Carlos, from Guatemala and studying in the Netherlands, asked whether this was not really democracy versus technocracy but rather a clash between two technocracies, citing the relationship between water-management technocrats and spatial planning in the Netherlands as an example. The three panelists agreed, describing it as a clash between digital IT technocracy and traditional planning technocracy. They added that a third technocracy — GIS experts — has now emerged within municipalities, raising the risk that planners themselves may fail to benefit from the advantages of the information model transition.

- Karen, a participant from Australia, said it was interesting that the Finnish planning system relies heavily on the plan as an output, and asked how a finalized plan actually influences real decisions afterward. The panelists replied that Finns trust legally binding plans, but actual implementation is shaped by other factors such as the economy. They explained that under neoliberalization, plans are also becoming increasingly flexible, and that in Finland a plan is in practice perceived as the plan map itself.

The moderator closed the session by noting that while no clear alternative had been offered, stirring up the discourse and getting people talking was itself a major contribution.

A Question Left for Seoul

Korea, too, is rapidly pushing forward the digital transformation of its urban planning information systems. The question raised at the opening plenary is directly our own. Even as standardization, machine-readability, and code lists raise efficiency, does the system design carry within it a foundation for understanding planning as a political and deliberative process?

If data and AI are to support planning without driving or replacing it, how should equity and deliberation be designed in alongside efficiency? The first task is for the two, or three, technocratic worlds to find a common language.

Source: WPSC 2026 opening plenary (June 29, 2026, 16:00, Aalto Sali), online streaming at vimeo.com/event/5991823. The text and quotations are based on a transcript (faster-whisper) of that streaming, and the photos are screen captures from the same streaming.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detailed Record ② International Student Competition — Planning Students Worldwide Redraw the "Periphery"

This is the second installment in the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It covers the International Student Competition awards ceremony and the opening of the winning-entries exhibition, held on the evening of Monday, June 29, 2026, following the opening plenary. The event revealed how vividly students interpreted the competition's overarching theme, 「Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Planning」.

Competition Overview: Over 50 Reinterpretations of the "Periphery"

The awards ceremony was led by jury chair Karin Krukfors, Associate Professor of Urban Design at Aalto University. The competition invited planning students worldwide to submit original studio projects responding to the competition theme, drawing more than 50 submissions. All entries were made public in the competition's website gallery. The jury comprised Paul Burton (Emeritus Professor, Griffith University), Sara Camponez (PhD candidate, Tampere University), and Hampri Kalanya (PhD candidate, Aalto University).

Krukfors summarized the major currents running through the entries as follows.

- Major themes included the evolution of planning, the repair and healing of places, mitigation of polycrisis, and long-term resilience through adaptive processes.

- Many works emphasized landscape architecture taking a leading role in planning, particularly in coastal areas.

- Notable works connected nature, ecology, and biodiversity to avoid uncontrolled urban sprawl, explored new meanings of the periphery such as shrinking cities and temporary settlements, and actively organized the rural-urban boundary.

- Smart cities and digital technology were rarely treated as standalone themes, appearing instead always integrated with other topics.

Three Honorary Mentions

"Vaiora," a Neighborhood Living with Water (Yifan Chen, University of Auckland)

This project addresses the Vaiora Valley, where the 2023 Auckland floods exposed flood risk. Vaiora means "many waters" in Māori, and also living water. In a place where urbanization has fragmented wetlands by replacing water with industry and impervious surfaces, the project proposes a compact, self-sufficient neighborhood that treats water as the very structure and system of urban life. The Māori (Manawhenua) value that water is life force set the direction for reciprocity, resilience, and long-term stewardship. The jury commented that the value-based, holistic approach and its foresight for climate resilience for future generations stood out, though it noted concerns about stigma from the separate placement of affordable housing.

"Beyond the Coastline" (Oltre la Linea di Costa) (Rosa Bianco et al., Sapienza University of Rome)

This is a regeneration strategy for Marina di Latina, Italy. Facing sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and flood risk, it takes the retreat of part of the existing urban fabric as its starting point. A canal becomes a new green spine, weaving together a linear park, ecological corridors, and blue-green infrastructure. The jury praised the project for directly confronting climate-accelerated coastal erosion and for treating planning as a laboratory for learning and experimentation, though it noted that the institutional and governance solutions for implementation were less developed than the sophistication of the analysis.

"Landscape and Walkability" Around a School, Through Children's Eyes (Natalia T. L. da Costa, University of São Paulo)

This project addresses children's walking and mobility around Paulo Prado public school in the Vila Nova Cachoeirinha district of São Paulo, Brazil. Integrating the perspectives of children, caregivers, and technical analysis, and using a gender-sensitive walkability index, it produced co-created improvement proposals. The jury praised the methodology, saying it convincingly filled an important gap—the voices of children, which are commonly missing from planning.

Third Place, "Living in Transit," When the Temporary Becomes Permanent (Trishna Deka Borua, Politecnico di Torino)

This project addresses the Anand Parbat resettlement camp in Delhi, India. Originally designed as a temporary resettlement site for residents displaced from Kathputli Colony, it has, over time, settled into a long-term, uncertain urban condition. The project reads informality not as a failure of planning but as a mode of governance already produced through delay, selective provisioning, and controlled access. It focuses on the margins, corridors, and informal spinal spaces where negotiation and social life become visible.

The award recipient, Trishna Deka Borua, took the stage and explained the project's purpose.

The goal was to make the conditions under which the temporary becomes permanent more legible, so that it functions as an act of resident resistance rather than quietly dissolving into the city unnoticed.

The jury called this a highly important theme at a time when temporary shelters are increasing worldwide due to conflict. It assessed that a key strength was that the innovation could be relatively easily implemented by the existing community, potentially bolstering residents' resistance to eviction.

Second Place, "Peripheral Metabolism," the Urban-Rural Boundary as a Control Device (İpek, Bilkent University)

This project addresses Kırklareli, a city of about 380,000 in Turkey's Thrace region. It redefines the urban periphery not as a target for outward expansion but as a productive, ecological boundary, using that boundary as a control device that channels internal growth while curbing sprawl. It integrates two river corridors into green infrastructure and the southern agricultural belt into the urban fabric as an active landscape of cultivation, education, and community.

The recipient, İpek, graduated in landscape and urban design from Bilkent University. In her presentation, she explained that Kırklareli's proximity to earthquake-prone Istanbul could make it a region absorbing population in the future, and that the key question was how to protect fertile farmland as the city grows rapidly.

The periphery is not surplus space awaiting construction — it is a living boundary that guides the city and protects production.

The jury called it a compelling vision for how a mid-sized city can manage growth pressure through reorganizing existing urban space rather than outward expansion, though it noted the project echoes historical garden-city principles, and that direct engagement with long-term adaptability and political-economic forces remains a task ahead.

First Place, "From Retention to Retreat," a Managed Retreat (Ted Kim, University of Auckland)

This project addresses high-value coastal housing at St Heliers and Achilles Point in Auckland, New Zealand. Even though sea-level rise and erosion have been precisely modeled, the project confronts head-on the structural tension in which the planning framework, prioritizing asset protection over long-term spatial transition, keeps housing locked in place. It proposes a phased transition guided by governance thresholds, hazard overlays, market-exit mechanisms, and coordinated infrastructure withdrawal — moving from retention to managed retreat. It redefines retreat not as abandonment but as the deliberate reorganization of settlement patterns, mobility systems, and ecological relationships, relocating housing inland and restoring the former coastline as a continuous ecological buffer.

The jury called it both visionary and highly feasible, praising it for clearly identifying the problem — including its political and governance dimensions — and consistently presenting plausible interventions, and for particularly shifting the vantage point from a masterplan to a long process. One line on the project's poster sums up the problem consciousness of this year's competition.

The periphery does not mean the edge of space. It means the values and relationships marginalized within a planning framework centered on asset protection and stability.

Future Planners, Carried Into the Exhibition

Krukfors said that judging was difficult given the many outstanding entries, but that seeing these students step into the field in whatever form ahead gives cause for hope about the future. The panel of winning entries was exhibited in the corridor outside the main auditorium, and participants then headed to the welcome reception held at Dipoli.

A Note for Seoul

It is symbolic that the three top-ranked entries each addressed managed retreat in response to sea-level rise, an urban-rural boundary as a device to control sprawl, and the permanence of informal settlement's temporariness. All three themes answer, in the language of planning, not growth and expansion but what to protect and where to retreat — questions that translate directly to Seoul and its metropolitan region, where climate, population, and inequality intersect. The younger generation was already posing the questions first: managed retreat for coastal and low-lying areas, boundary strategies for greenbelts and farmland, and managing the permanence of jjokbang rooms and informal dwellings.

Source: WPSC 2026 International Student Competition awards ceremony (evening of June 29, 2026, Aalto Sali), online stream at vimeo.com/event/5991898. The text and quotations are based on a transcript of the stream (faster-whisper), and photos are screen captures from the same stream, including the panel of winning entries.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detailed Record ③ Day-2 opening plenary, GPEAN's 25th anniversary and UN-Habitat's question: "Planning is not peripheral"

This is the third installment in the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It covers the Day-2 opening plenary held on the morning of Tuesday, June 30, 2026, in the main hall of Aalto University. That morning consisted of the official welcome remarks that opened the congress, the opening address marking the 25th anniversary of the founding of host organization GPEAN, the organizing committee chair's commentary on the congress theme, and a video message and working-level presentation from the UN-Habitat Executive Director. The morning keynote (Libby Porter) followed after the morning tea break and will be covered in the next installment.

The Day-2 opening, and Aalto University as the stage

The session was moderated by Raine Mäntysalo, chair of the congress's Local Organizing Committee (LOC). Aalto University President Ilkka Niemelä then delivered the welcome remarks. He introduced Aalto University as an institution born in 2010 from the merger of Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics, and the University of Art and Design Helsinki.

- The Otaniemi campus, where science and technology, business, and art and design come together in one place, is one of Europe's leading innovation hubs. It hosts roughly 1,500 high-tech companies nearby, brings together members of more than 120 nationalities, and gives rise to some 100 startups every year.

- The campus is also a place where nature and the city intermingle. The Laajalahti nature reserve, the finest bird wetland in the Helsinki region, lies just 1 km away, and the campus's own metro station puts central Helsinki little more than 10 minutes away.

Niemelä framed the congress's overarching theme as follows.

A new planning agenda is needed for biodiversity and inclusiveness across all species — and likewise for difficult social and political issues such as geopolitical shifts, international migration, shortages of critical minerals, and rising activity in last frontiers such as the Arctic.

GPEAN's 25th-anniversary opening address (Aysin Dedekorkut-Howes)

Aysin Dedekorkut-Howes, Council Chair of host organization the Global Planning Education Associations Network (GPEAN), delivered the official opening address. She emphasized that this year marks the 25th anniversary of WPSC's founding — its silver jubilee, so to speak.

- WPSC is not an annual event but a congress held once every five years. Its history began in Shanghai (2001) and continued through Mexico City (2006), Perth (2011), Rio de Janeiro (2016), and Bali (2022); 2026 marks the sixth congress, and the first ever held in Europe, in Helsinki.

- GPEAN is a network that connects regional associations of planning schools worldwide, aiming to raise the excellence of planning education and foster cooperation across geographic, cultural, and institutional boundaries. Its flagship initiatives include the book series "Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning," whose forthcoming edition addresses climate change; work on core planning competencies; and a newly launched worldwide inventory and survey of planning schools.

- Representatives of each member association were introduced on the day: representatives from Africa (AAPS), the United States (ACSP), Europe (AESOP), Latin America (ALEUP), Brazil (ANPUR), and Indonesia (ASPI), together with representatives of professional associations affiliated with the Global Planners Network (GPN).

Dedekorkut-Howes framed the fundamental question posed by the congress theme, "Peripheral Visions," as follows.

Whose knowledge, experience, and perspectives shape planning theory and practice? All too often, the dominant narratives of planning have centered particular regions, institutions, and epistemologies, overlooking voices that are peripheral geographically, socially, and intellectually.

She noted that the periphery is not merely a site of disadvantage but a site of innovation, resilience, and possibility — resonating strongly with perspectives from the Global South, where innovation is often born of necessity. She added that addressing this theme in Finland is itself symbolic: globally, Finland too could be considered peripheral, yet it demonstrates internationally recognized leadership in sustainability, inclusive governance, and innovative planning practice.

The organizing committee chair's commentary on the theme: "transformative ideas from the periphery"

Mäntysalo explained how the congress theme came about, identifying transformative ideas that remain at the periphery of the planning field today but are gradually becoming mainstream.

- The digitalization of planning. Contrary to the common assumption that digital tools are merely auxiliary equipment for traditional planning, this is in fact a highly transformative shift. With AI now added to the mix, it is difficult to foresee what this will mean for planning practice, infrastructure, and the roles of stakeholders.

- Futures. Beyond forecasting, which projects past trends forward, foresight — which imagines hidden signals and black swans and prepares even for improbable futures — is becoming increasingly important.

- Strong sustainability. The sustainable development articulated some 40 years ago in the Brundtland Report is regarded today as weak sustainability. Preparing for climate change and biodiversity loss requires a stronger form of sustainability that recognizes the planet's limits to growth.

- Degrowth and shrinkage. As urbanization advances, rural areas become further marginalized and population polarization deepens. A considerable share of planning problems are, in fact, questions of how to manage shrinkage — a hidden theme overshadowed by metropolitanization. Since a growthist paradigm of continuous economic growth cannot bear this burden, a new paradigm is needed that addresses degrowth through planning.

- Decolonial and postcolonial planning. This is the recognition that planning ideas once presented as universal and general were in fact contextual products shaped by conditions of the Global North — liberal democracy, stable infrastructure, and the rule of law. This theme is taken up in Libby Porter's keynote later this same morning.

Mäntysalo noted that this congress comprises 15 tracks, 30 special sessions, 58 roundtables, and more than 1,200 presentations, and stressed that the actual substance is built through the voluntary efforts of track, session, and roundtable chairs and presenters.

Message from the UN-Habitat Executive Director (Anacláudia Rossbach)

UN-Habitat Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach was unable to attend in person but sent a video message. Her answer to the provocative question posed by the congress theme — whether planning is becoming peripheral — was unequivocal.

Planning is not peripheral. Knowledge is not peripheral. Education is never peripheral. For the sustainability of cities and the right to adequate housing, we need you — to close the gaps in knowledge and capacity — now more than ever.

Rossbach urged the audience to confront the scale of the urban challenge head-on. According to the recently released World Cities Report 2026, up to 3.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate housing, and more than 1 billion live in informal settlements and slums without environmental protection, tenure security, or basic services. By 2050, the urban population will grow by roughly another 2 billion.

- Housing is not a single sector but the foundation on which health, education, livelihoods, resilience, and social cohesion are built. Yet in far too many places, planning systems are disconnected from housing realities. Some 167 million housing units could face severe climate risk by 2040, and buildings account for roughly 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Planning determines where and how we build. Planning can either entrench vulnerability or strengthen equity and justice.

- Planning becomes peripheral not because it loses relevance, but when it becomes disconnected from the realities people face every day and from people-centered, integrated practice. Data, digital twins, geospatial thinking, and AI hold great promise, but they remain only means, never ends.

The question is not whether AI can replace planners, but how planners can harness AI while upholding human rights, transparency, accountability, and democratic governance. Human judgment matters, local knowledge matters, and above all, planning must be done with people and for people.

Rossbach closed by noting that the decade from 2026 to 2036 will determine whether we move closer to spatial justice, climate resilience, and adequate housing for all, and called for making this era a decade of action for sustainable urbanization.

UN-Habitat working-level presentation, the WOOF Academy (Rafael Vignola)

Rafael Vignola of UN-Habitat's Knowledge and Innovation Branch then presented. His central theme was closing the knowledge and capacity gaps in urban practice worldwide.

- At the heart of UN-Habitat's strategic plan is housing, land, and basic services for all as the ultimate outcome, with integrated urban and regional planning as one of the means to achieve it. Planning is positioned as a means to an end.

- The WOOF Academy, launched this year at the World Urban Forum (WUF), is a new partnership between UN-Habitat and knowledge institutions worldwide. A roundtable of 12 experts, facilitated by Carlos Moreno, discussed the key research questions and educational innovation opportunities that could accelerate progress toward adequate housing.

- The gaps are geographic as well as quantitative and qualitative. The Global South suffers from a particular shortage of data, along with a shortage of trained urban experts and planners themselves, and there is also a qualitative question of whether those who are trained have tools suited to today's urbanization challenges.

- He introduced free online courses on the UN-Habitat Learn platform, 20-minute microlearning courses on adequate housing, and the development of an urban resilience capacity framework for least-developed countries (launched in Lusaka, Zambia), and asked faculty to incorporate these courses into their curricula.

Q&A

The Q&A that followed the presentations was likewise rich.

- Julie Lawson of RMIT introduced "Housing 2030," produced jointly by UN-Habitat, UNECE, and Housing Europe with some 80 scholars from 56 countries, arguing that governments and planners must not merely react to markets but actively shape them. Asked how to translate knowledge exchange into a genuine understanding of diverse housing systems, Vignola replied that there is no single answer — it is highly context-dependent — and that what is needed is a database of housing practice cases and the building of a knowledge ecosystem at scale.

- A participant who had served as secretary-general of the first congress in Shanghai 25 years ago noted that over the past 25 years the World Urban Planning Education Network (WUPEN) has amassed more than 5,000 lectures, with some 28,000 enrollments in 10-minute lectures designed for student attention spans, and pledged support for the WOOF Academy.

- One participant, drawing on the previous day's keynote on democracy versus technocracy, observed that treating housing purely as a matter of technical expertise risks obscuring the deeper underlying problem: the absence of democracy. Vignola responded that this is precisely why the intergovernmental process — the open-ended working group — matters. He said the foundation of the UN-Habitat narrative is inclusion, and that without an inclusive and democratic process, no amount of accumulated technical knowledge will change the outcome.

- Aparna Das, a PhD candidate at the University of Reading, said the real problem is a loop in which capacity already exists but has nowhere to be absorbed: many people in India are trained and qualified as planners, yet the real estate sector they return to work in has little to do with what they were trained for. Vignola called this a very interesting perspective, adding that capacity building must go beyond acquiring knowledge to include practicing and learning in the field.

A note for Seoul

That morning showed that UN-Habitat and the global planning academy stand before the same question: restore housing to the center of planning, reconnect territory, economy, and ecology, and embrace technology while safeguarding equity. The 3.4 billion people in housing deficit cited in Rossbach's World Cities Report 2026 is not someone else's story. Seoul and the wider metropolitan region share the same task — planning housing integrally rather than separately from transport, jobs, and services, and using data and AI as tools while safeguarding a people-centered, democratic process.

Source: WPSC 2026 Day-2 opening plenary (June 30, 2026, 09:00, Aalto Sali), online stream at vimeo.com/event/5991907. The body text and quotations are based on a transcript of this stream (faster-whisper), and the photographs are screen captures from the same stream.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detailed Record ④ Libby Porter's Keynote, "Toxic Urbanism and the Duplicity of Planning" — Interrogating Planning Anew

This is the fourth installment in the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It covers the first formal keynote lecture held on the morning of Tuesday, June 30, 2026, following the opening of the second day. The speaker was Libby Porter, Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University, Australia, and the lecture was titled "Toxic Urbanism and the Duplicity of Planning." It was the most provocative lecture of this congress, directly interrogating the very foundations of planning as a discipline and a practice.

The Speaker and the Central Question

Congress coordinator Eva Purkarthofer, who moderated the session, introduced Porter as a scholar who has studied the dispossession and displacement produced by urbanization, and the practices that resist them. Porter's question was this: how does urbanization produce dispossession and displacement, and what can we do about it?

Porter began by questioning the congress theme itself, the word "periphery."

The periphery depends on where you stand. What counts as the center and what counts as the margin, and who decides that?

What a Map Does Not Tell You

Porter opened with a map of her home city, Melbourne, Australia. Her starting point was a conversation with Dan, an activist working to restore the customary rights of the Bunurong Indigenous people. When Porter asked why Bunurong land — in their own terms, Country, capitalized — took this particular shape, Dan answered that Bunurong governance and law predate the flooding of the bay, some 1,000 years ago, when the bay was still dry land. Through this story, Porter acknowledged that she herself sees space through "eyes trained in a particular way."

Every discipline uses categories and orientations to organize how things are meant to be seen, and then proclaims that orientation as if it were a universal gaze without history, a "view from nowhere." Inconvenient histories are erased in the process.

Porter disclosed that she lives as a settler on stolen land in what she calls "so-called Australia," and noted that the relationship between the Finnish state and the Indigenous Sámi people rests on the same colonial structure. She added a further reflection: that even the act of traveling to attend a conference is deeply entangled in colonial systems.

The "Racial Regime" at the Foundation of Planning

Porter's central argument is that planning was built upon a racial regime. She urged the audience to look at the most basic tool beneath our feet: the map. The map shown was the 1853 subdivision plan of Northcote, Melbourne, drawn by assistant surveyor Richard Larratt. This map "creates" a suburban residential subdivision, through survey lines and lot boundaries, out of land that the Wurundjeri people had known, loved, and governed for more than 60,000 years.

Porter traced the condition that made this map possible: the so-called Batman Treaty, in which the Englishman John Batman claimed in 1835 to have "bought" tens of thousands of acres of land for a handful of blankets and axes. Indigenous leaders understood it as a safe-passage agreement allowing temporary passage through the land. Within three years, the city grid had been drawn; within fifty years, everyone who had lived there had disappeared through killing, expulsion, or capture.

Overlaying one ecological, proprietary, extractive order onto an existing socio-ecological order, and sustaining it into the future, is rooted in racial categories — categories of who becomes an owner, who becomes ownerless, and who can become property.

Citing Cedric Robinson, Porter said that a racial regime is a deliberately constructed social system, made to appear as though it were natural and without history. Within the discipline of planning, she noted, race and white-supremacist regimes are treated as a "peripheral" area of research — and it is precisely this manner of treatment that allows the racial regime to be reproduced easily and invisibly.

The Housing Crisis and "Toxic Urbanism"

Porter returned to a particular parcel in Northcote. The Walker Street public housing estate, built there in the early 1960s, was a successful medium-rise complex of 86 units. Fifty years later, however, the government let the buildings deteriorate through neglected maintenance, then designated this estate and ten other inner-city medium-rise estates for redevelopment on the grounds that they were "no longer fit for purpose." Residents resisted eviction but were ultimately displaced, and the estate was redeveloped by a private consortium into high-density, upmarket housing.

Through redevelopment, this estate went from 100% public housing to 0% public housing.

Porter directly criticized today's housing-crisis discourse. In Australia, more than 65,000 households are on the social housing waiting list, and most will never be housed. Yet, she argued, the sharper the diagnosis of the crisis becomes, the more the industry, saying "let's not waste a crisis," is already there at the starting line.

Every solution hinges on the narrative of supply. Build, build, build. And for that, you need land. Land, land, land. This is a familiar script, tuned exactly to the rhythm of the real-estate investment lobby.

She argued that this supply narrative reduces land to an "asset class," and that the way it classifies land as surplus, wasted, underutilized, or idle is itself classed and racialized. She identified two forms of "washing" that dress up this entire process.

- Care washing: an attitude that presents mass forced evictions as though they were for the wellbeing and public good of residents. The "relocation process," which begins with a resettlement officer knocking on the door, appears on the surface to be a matter of choice, but is in reality coercion and manipulation. In one lawsuit, the head of a housing authority testified that the sole documentation behind the decision to displace ten thousand people was a note on half a page of a personal notebook — and that having a human rights charter posted on the office wall was cited as evidence that "human rights had been adequately considered."

- Indigenous washing: a way of stating Indigenous interests explicitly within a plan while, in practice, operating to sustain that very regime. Victoria's Aboriginal Heritage Act permits consultation only in places "where the ground has not previously been disturbed," structurally excluding land that has already been developed. Even the historic treaty signed in 2025 mentions "land" 51 times in its preamble, yet in its actual implementation clauses, "land" amounts to no more than a single commitment to use more Indigenous place names.

Porter named this duplicity "the duplicity of planning." Living homes are erased through forced displacement while being packaged as "regeneration"; the destruction of ecological and cultural worlds is packaged as "development certainty." Citing British research, she also pointed to the paradox that planners claim their work serves the public interest while simultaneously knowing that it does not.

The public interest is a structural ideological illusion. Liberalism is organized to deliberately misrecognize and distort equality, fairness, and inclusion, and its primary function is to claim moral authority while blocking fundamental change.

So What Is to Be Done?

Porter borrowed a phrase from Natalie Osborne: that even amid structural ruin, possible worlds still exist. Deliberately holding back from offering prescriptions, she urged that, instead of reproducing the racial regime, we follow forms of knowledge and practice rooted in love. She cited decolonial feminism, queer politics, land-back movements, and the everyday refusals mounted against eviction, over-policing, and the fear of scarcity as examples.

Truth-telling — peeling back the layers of what is actually happening — becomes progressively harder. But refusal remains an essential precondition for rebuilding the worlds that are still possible.

Rather than standardization or scaling up, she emphasized emplacement, attentiveness, and dignity. If planning is understood as a discipline concerned with the relationships among people, place, and the future, then, she concluded, our task and responsibility is to treat justice not as something pronounced by the powerful or granted by the state, but as a relational practice lived out through solidarity and reciprocity.

Question and Answer

- Joseph Jiao of the University of West Scotland asked how, if liberal planning concepts such as participation, inclusion, and the public interest reproduce inequality, one distinguishes genuine reform from "toxic urbanism dressed in progressive language." Porter answered that the prescription itself may be part of the problem, and that fractures arise precisely because people are not standing in good relation to one another.

- August, an undergraduate at Cornell University, asked how the disconnect between policymakers and planning educators could be bridged. Porter said the key is to form alliances with the good people already working on the ground, and to draw not only formal planners but also those affected into a community of practice — exercising the muscles of a "democracy that is actually alive."

- Nidhi of the University of Toronto asked what advice Porter would give to students and early-career researchers who are easily excluded or cancelled for speaking truth in authoritarian contexts. Porter acknowledged that we do not all stand in the same position, and said that there are moments when someone like herself, a tenured professor, must use the leverage of hierarchy to speak out. The point, she said, is to build strong communities of practice that watch each other's backs.

- Semida, a doctoral candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, asked how a "sense of home" could be created in refugee housing. Porter answered that we should stop reducing home to four walls and a roof, and instead redefine it as a broader relationship of dwelling that includes neighbors, services, mobility, and relationships.

- Rob Taft of Iowa State University asked whether this duplicity also operates in cities like Detroit, which experience decline and abandonment rather than growth. Porter answered that we must ask what counts as growth, innovation, housing, and belonging, and who gets to decide that.

A Question Left for Seoul

Porter's lecture offers no comfortable answers. But that discomfort is precisely the point. The process by which an estate goes from 100% public housing to 0% through redevelopment; forced displacement that begins with a diagnosis of "no longer fit for purpose"; a supply discourse that counts land only as an asset — none of these scenes are unfamiliar to Seoul's urban renewal projects and public housing policy. What is needed is an honest re-examination of who the language planning uses — regeneration, renewal, the public interest, inclusion — actually serves in practice.

Source: WPSC 2026 Libby Porter keynote lecture (June 30, 2026, 11:00, Aalto Sali), online streaming at vimeo.com/event/5991917. The text and quotations are based on a transcript of this streaming (faster-whisper), and the photographs are screen captures from the same streaming.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detail Record ⑤ University of Helsinki Morning Keynote, the General History of China's Urbanization and the New Geopolitics of Planning

This is the fifth installment in the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It summarizes the morning keynote plenary held on the morning of Wednesday, July 1, 2026, in the Great Hall of the University of Helsinki's Main Building. That morning was filled with three broad perspectives: a general history of China's urbanization, a panel discussion on its future and transition, and the new geopolitics of planning. This installment covers the two 09:00 keynotes, namely Professor Liu Jian's history of Chinese planning and Professor Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ's new geopolitics of planning.

One clarification is in order. For this 09:00 session, no online streaming (Vimeo) recording was made available after the plenary concluded. This installment is therefore compiled from on-site observation notes and photographs taken at the venue, rather than from a transcript. The panel discussion that followed later the same day (chaired by Noijonen) was streamed and is covered in detail through transcript in the sixth installment.

① China's Urbanization and the Evolution of Planning (LIU Jian, Tsinghua University)

Professor Liu Jian (劉健) of the Tsinghua University School of Architecture, in his keynote "Coordinating for Consensus on High-Quality Development: Planning in China," surveyed the full historical arc of Chinese planning tradition, from three millennia of history to the present day.

His starting point was the logic of the traditional era. The spatial organization of the capital, Beijing, symbolized and centralized power in accordance with the natural topography of mountains and rivers and the principles of ritual propriety (禮制) and feng shui, with architectural codes reflecting social hierarchy. The narrative then moved to the transplantation of modern planning institutions through the treaty ports and concessions of the mid-19th century opening (Shanghai, the German concession in Qingdao, and others), followed by the Soviet-aided 156 key industrial projects and the danwei (單位)-centered urban fabric of the socialist industrialization period of the 1950s.

Next came the hyper-rapid urbanization following reform and opening-up. Absorbing a rural-to-urban migration of more than ten million people annually, new districts and development zones proliferated. Examples cited included the relocation of Beijing's sub-center to Tongzhou, Xiong'an New Area, and the European-style small towns of Shanghai's "One City, Nine Towns." He also noted the rise of megacity city-clusters such as Jing-Jin-Ji and the Yangtze and Pearl River Delta regions.

Liu Jian identified the 2019 integrated reform of territorial spatial planning (國土空間規劃) as a major turning point. The narrative continued through ecological civilization and ecological protection red lines (the "1.8 billion mu farmland red line," and integrated conservation of mountains, water, forests, farmland, lakes, and grasslands), urban regeneration that revived reclaimed land and steelworks as parks (Tangshan, Shenzhen), participatory community planner systems and the 15-minute living area standard, and, further, the shift "from growth to qualitative development" amid aging and climate change, along with the challenge of shrinking cities in the Northeast.

Planning's public role lies in defining and working through problems. That said, the relationship between central and local government, metropolitan coordination, and social segregation remain persistent challenges.

② The New Geopolitics of Planning, Globalization 2.0 (Bayırbağ, METU)

The third keynote, "The New Geocortex of Planning — Globalization 2.0, Emergency Diagnostics and Transformational Planning," most sharply unsettled the tenor of the session that day. Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ of the Middle East Technical University (METU) called his own talk a kind of collective therapy in which he reflected alongside the audience, redefining planning as a psychological and cognitive need to reduce uncertainty, and, at its core, an inherently spatial and political activity.

His central diagnosis was that the problems and objects of intervention no longer stay confined to fixed administrative jurisdictions. As people, information, services, and problems all become "moving targets," conventional planning anchored to fixed jurisdictions is rendered powerless.

The nation-state is not disappearing but is being reorganized into a vast governance matrix — like an interconnected super-brain whose body remains the same even as its soul can no longer be contained within that body.

Bayırbağ argued that what actually drives this matrix are informal networks and "network administrators." The closer one sits to its center, the more other governments come to depend on that actor, giving rise to strongman politics and one-man rule. Leaving the conclusion open by admitting he himself did not know whether recentralization was the answer, he left two tasks for further work.

Networks do not democratize themselves. One must be organized well enough to enter and reorganize them. And the very concepts of space, visualization, and mobility must be reworked from the ground up.

What the Two Keynotes Pointed To

Liu Jian's historical account showed that planning evolves together with particular political and economic conjunctures, while Bayırbağ's new geopolitics called for flexible governance that goes beyond fixed jurisdictions. Different in texture, both keynotes nonetheless pointed to the same thing: the very framework of space and power that planning deals with is now undergoing major change.

Notes for Seoul

Liu Jian's integrated reform of territorial spatial planning is an attempt to bind sectorally scattered plans into a single spatial framework, offering a reference point for discussions on integrating our own national and urban planning systems. Bayırbağ's "moving targets" and governance matrix map precisely onto the reality of the Seoul metropolitan area, where mobility, data, and services cross administrative boundaries. How to design flexible yet democratic metropolitan governance that goes beyond fixed jurisdictions remains an unresolved task for Seoul as well.

Source: WPSC 2026, University of Helsinki morning keynote (2026.7.1 09:00, University of Helsinki Main Building). As no online streaming recording was made available for this 09:00 session, the text is based on on-site observation notes and the photographs on on-site captures. See the sixth installment for the panel discussion held the same day (streaming available).

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detailed Record ⑥ "Redefining the Future of Planning," the Neuvonen Panel Discussion

This is the sixth installment in the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It records the panel discussion "Redefining the Future of Planning: Digital Advances and the Sustainability Transition," held on the morning of Wednesday, July 1, 2026, in the Main Building of the University of Helsinki. The chair was Aleksi Neuvonen, co-founder of the Finnish think tank Demos Helsinki and a futurist, joined by three panelists. The session confronted head-on the very notion of "the future" that planning deals with.

This installment transcribes the latter half of the July 1 morning plenary (the panel discussion), for which streaming was properly available. The keynote in the first half of that same morning (Liu Jian and others) was not streamed, so that content was instead recorded on-site and covered in the summary series installment "Three Perspectives."

The Chair's Opening Provocation: The Future Is Unknowable

Neuvonen began with four powerful "imaginaries": sustainability, digital, twin, and transition. Imaginaries shape the expectations that people and organizations hold about the future, and those expectations in turn dictate present action.

The future is unknowable. We gather data and build more sophisticated models, but what we end up doing is constructing useful, sometimes necessary, fictions about the future. We simply pretend they are knowledge.

He described planning as a practice that takes out a "deep future mortgage." The structures planning produces last for decades, and their realization also takes decades. Yet the imaginaries of transition give rise to several tensions.

- In trying to make the transition democratic, we end up emphasizing a new technocracy.

- Justice is said to guide the transition, but justice tends to remain a goal rather than a fact.

- Green growth is promised, yet there is still no evidence of a global decoupling of economic growth from ecological load.

- AI promises hyper-productivity while simultaneously threatening technological deflation and mass job loss.

Borrowing James Bridle's "New Dark Age," Neuvonen argued that the more layers of technology accumulate, the more unpredictable the future actually becomes. He also warned against Lauren Berlant's "cruel optimism."

Long-term transitions always promise something good, yet the future keeps receding. The breakthrough is always two steps ahead, so waiting becomes not a single event but a persistent condition.

Even so, he said positive visions are necessary. Unless people are freed from the constraints of past experience and led into collective action by the expectation of a better future, they fall into the trap of "futurelessness," trapped within an inherited dominant future. As solutions, he proposed backcasting — defining a set of desirable futures and tracing a path back from them to the present — along with protopia, avant-garde politics, and niche experimentation.

Panel ① Enza Lissandrello — Enacting the Future in Everyday Life

Enza Lissandrello of Aalborg University noted that planners are preoccupied with the future and believe they can control it. She cited sociologist John Urry's What is the Future?

We are in a society where everything is mobility, and the future itself is mobile. The future no longer arrives in stages. It approaches the present at an accelerating speed.

Lissandrello said the traditional planning progression — moving through stages 1, 2, 3 from imagination to institution — comes under great strain in today's fluid society. Her research focus was on how people enact the future in everyday life, and which of those enactments can be institutionalized.

Panel ② Marjan Marjanović — AI Makes Us Act Like AI

Marjan Marjanović of the University of Lausanne picked up from the previous day's keynote on the digitalization of Finnish planning, arguing that although data claims objectivity, efficiency, and speed, it still remains a "black box" that leaves epistemic uncertainty behind. She then overturned a common assumption about AI.

The way AI comes to dominate the world is not through some invisible machine controlling everything, but by making us behave more and more like AI ourselves — that is, coded. Just as a smartwatch tells us when to sit and when to walk, we become coded to behave in certain ways even without using AI directly.

Recalling the previous day's observation that planners and software engineers "do not speak the same language," she asked what is lost in the process of our becoming increasingly coded.

The fundamental question for planning is whether planning can safeguard authentic human experience. We must resist the tendency toward becoming coded and rethink what it means to be human.

Panel ③ Amanda Machin — Imaginaries Compete in the Plural

Amanda Machin, a political sociologist at the University of Agder, said that she herself is not a planner, and that political imaginaries exist in a plural state, competing for dominance. As a prime example, she pointed to the "net zero" imaginary.

The net zero imaginary implies that responding to climate change requires no change to lifestyles, energy cultures, social norms, or institutions. Emissions, it suggests, will be reduced through technologies such as carbon capture and storage or nuclear power. It is a modern, Promethean imaginary that sees the future as something that can be opened up and colonized through human action, underpinned by a techno-optimism that technology will simply and smoothly arrive in the future to solve the problems of the present.

Machin noted the criticism that this imaginary crowds out discussion of broader and more diverse social and institutional change, as well as the backlash of "anti-net-zero populism" it has provoked — and said this is precisely why other imaginaries are needed.

What the Three Threads Pointed To

The three panelists took different approaches, yet pointed in one direction: the future is driven not by technology but by the imaginaries and values we choose. Lissandrello found her thread in everyday enactment, Marjanović in the preservation of human experience, and Machin in the plurality of imaginaries and democratic contestation. A question Neuvonen posed, twisting Camus, held the session for a long while afterward.

Is planning worth doing at all? And yet planning is, at its core, a fundamentally human act. Because looking ahead to the future and thinking about the world is human nature, we cannot stop planning.

A Question Left for Seoul

Seoul, too, writes "imaginaries of the future" — 2050 carbon neutrality, the 15-minute city, the digital twin — into the language of planning. This panel's question asks whose imaginaries these are, and whether they are trapped in a net-zero-style optimism that defers problems to technology. As data and AI increasingly assist planning, how to preserve a place for "authentic human experience" and democratic imagination remains the task ahead.

Source: WPSC 2026 panel discussion "Redefining the Future of Planning" (morning of July 1, 2026, Main Building, University of Helsinki), online streaming at vimeo.com/event/5991927. The text and quotations are based on a transcript of that stream (faster-whisper), and the photos are screen captures from the same stream.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detail Record ⑦ The Best Paper Session and the GPEAN Best Congress Paper — The Lineage of the "Dialogues" Book Series

This is the seventh installment in the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It covers the Best Paper plenary held on the morning of Thursday, July 2, 2026, in the main hall of Aalto University. This session is where the host organization GPEAN awards and presents the Best Congress Paper of the general assembly.

One clarification is in order. The Vimeo stream for this session was set to embed-only, so unlike the other installments, downloading the recording and producing a transcript was not possible. Accordingly, instead of a transcript, this installment has been compiled from the congress program and from GPEAN's own explanation, given at the closing plenary, of the Best Congress Paper award and the lineage of the "Dialogues" book series.

What the Best Paper Session Represents

The Best Paper plenary is where outstanding achievements are singled out from among the roughly 1,200 papers presented across the congress's various tracks and showcased before the entire academic community. At the closing plenary, GPEAN placed this Best Congress Paper competition alongside the International Student Paper Competition and thanked the judging panels for their efforts.

We thank the track chairs and session chairs, the keynote speakers, the judges of the International Student Paper Competition and the Best Congress Paper competition, and the organizers and mentors of the doctoral workshop. They are the ones who recognize excellence and support the next generation.

Awarding a separate "Best Paper" at the planning schools' congress is more than mere commendation. At a gathering that brings together the world's planning academia only once every five years, it is an act of declaring what the field currently recognizes as significant achievement.

The "Dialogues" Book Series: A Lineage Rooted in the Best Paper Award

At the closing plenary, GPEAN explained in detail how this Best Paper tradition was the root of its flagship publication series, "Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning." This lineage best illustrates the significance of the Best Paper session.

- In the series' early days, the first three or four volumes were literally collections of best papers: each member association submitted one or two papers it had selected by its own method to the editorial committee, which then compiled them. The structure ensured every association was represented by at least one paper.

- Starting with Volume 6, the character of the series changed. Rather than a compilation of best papers by association, it became a thematic book compiled through a more coordinated effort centered on a single theme.

This continued with Volume 6, "The Right to the City" (2017), Volume 7, "Transformative Planning," and the forthcoming Volume 8, "Dialogues in Planning for Climate Change," scheduled for publication in 2027.

GPEAN stated that the theme of the upcoming Volume 9 has been set as "the past and future of planning education," and that it plans to gather comparative material from around the world. What began as a stream flowing from each congress's best papers has, today, grown into a globally collaborative work of authorship reflecting on climate change and on planning education itself.

A Note for Seoul

The lineage of the Best Paper session and the "Dialogues" book series shows how the planning academic community has accumulated the excellence of individual papers as a shared global asset. For Seoul and Korea's planning academia, contributing to best papers and thematic volumes on this international stage is a channel for placing our data and methodological research within an international comparative framework. Whether the Seoul- and Busan-based studies presented at this congress (on living-zone accessibility, N-minute cities, and the like) can become a chapter in a future "Dialogues" volume remains an open question.

Source: WPSC 2026 Best Paper plenary (July 2, 2026, 09:00, Aalto Sali). As the streaming for this session was embed-only with no access to the recording, the text is based on the congress program and on GPEAN's remarks in the closing plenary stream (vimeo.com/event/5991955). Photos are a file photo of the plenary hall (Aalto University main hall) and a screen capture from the closing plenary.

WPSC 2026 Plenary Detailed Record ⑧ Closing Plenary, GPEAN's 25th Anniversary "The Past 25 Years, the Next 25 Years"

This is the final installment of the WPSC 2026 plenary streaming transcript series. It summarizes the closing plenary that concluded the five-day general assembly on the afternoon of Friday, July 3, 2026. This closing session doubled as the 25th anniversary commemorative assembly of the host organization, the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN). The session was chaired by GPEAN secretary Paulo Silva, and was filled with a video retracing the 25-year journey, a relay of remarks from representatives of each member association, and a look ahead to the next 25 years.

25 Years, Stories of People

Silva opened by saying that this assembly was a celebration of GPEAN's 25 years, beyond just a week-long event.

GPEAN's story is, in the end, a story of people — of educators, students, researchers, and practitioners who chose collaboration and dialogue over isolation.

He noted that GPEAN today connects more than 500 planning schools worldwide, and that its strength lies not in numbers but in the fact that knowledge flows across borders. Ideas developed in one place spark innovation elsewhere, and students, faculty, and schools become international collaborators. He pointed out that over the past 25 years, GPEAN has gone beyond hosting congresses to create space for doctoral researchers, contribute to major platforms such as the World Urban Forum (WUF), and work with UN-Habitat to strengthen the global planning agenda.

Universities are not places where knowledge is stored, but places where new ideas are tested, challenged, and turned into action.

Shanghai 2001, Memories of the Beginning

The highlight of the closing was a video message from Prof. Wu of Tongji University, who led the founding. He recalled the problem awareness of 25 years ago as follows.

In 2001, cities were changing very quickly, but planning education was truly disconnected. Regional and national associations and schools each worked alone, and there was no global discussion. So, with the help of regional associations from around the world, we held the first World Congress of Planning Schools at Tongji University in Shanghai.

On July 5, 2001, planning schools from around the world gathered under one roof for the first time in history and adopted the "Shanghai Statement." It was the moment associations agreed to unite, communicate, and build a single global network. Prof. Wu recalled building the congress's and the association's first website in the early days of the internet, and providing technical help so that colleagues in Africa could set up websites amid poor facilities at the time. He noted that 15 years later, that website returned to Africa, and then to Latin America.

Shanghai taught us that planning education faces the same difficulties everywhere, and that we are stronger together. So we began, and we continue on.

Member Association Relay — One Journey

Next came a round-table session in which representatives of each member association took turns picking up a chapter of the congress's history. Jean-Michel Roux of the French-speaking association (APERAU) opened the discussion. He said that APERAU, which started in 1984 with just six schools, sought to establish a charter defining planning education, and that this experience contributed to establishing urban planning as an independent discipline. In the late 1980s, working toward the same goal, it helped establish the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), and later expanded APERAU beyond Europe into an international French-speaking forum spanning Canada, Africa, and the Middle East, upon which GPEAN arrived to become the cornerstone of a complete international network.

Representatives from each continent emphasized that the journey from Shanghai (2001) through Mexico City (2006), Perth (2011), Rio de Janeiro (2016), and Bali (2022) to Helsinki was not merely a list of host cities but a growing international community. Silva asked those who had attended Shanghai, Mexico City, Perth, Rio, Bali, and Helsinki to raise their hands, confirming that each congress reflected the challenges of its era while also strengthening the relationships to carry the community forward together.

The Next 25 Years

The outlook was also concrete. The next congress will be decided through a call for proposals, and associations that have not yet hosted a congress — Africa (AAPS), North America (ACSP), Canada (ACUPP), the French-speaking association (APERAU), and others — were mentioned as candidates. The Turkish association (TUBOP) said it would wait for a future opportunity, having hosted the AESOP congress the previous year.

While awaiting the next congress, the schedules of member associations were also announced.

- ACSP (North America) — October, Pittsburgh, USA

- Turkish association — November, World Town Planning Day annual congress

- APSA (Asia) — November, Hong Kong

- ALEUP (Latin America) — July next year, Medellín, Colombia (within the framework of the International Congress of Americanists)

- AESOP (Europe) — July next year, Birmingham, UK

It was also announced that the next volume (Volume 8) of GPEAN's flagship publication, "Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning," will address climate change response under the theme of "transitional pathways," and that Volume 9 has been set as "The Past and Future of Planning Education," which will gather comparative data from around the world. The core competencies project and the worldwide inventory and survey of planning schools will also continue.

Silva's closing remarks brought the five days to a close.

In commemorating 25 years, we celebrate not only what has been achieved, but the community that has sustained and shaped it together. Here's to another 25 years of collaboration, learning, and the advancement of planning education worldwide.

Notes for Seoul

The closing plenary translated the overarching theme of "Peripheral Visions" into the language of the organization itself. The principle of elevating peripheral knowledge and context to the center applies equally to methodology and to governance. From Seoul's perspective, three points stand out. First, the trend toward international standardization of planning education and practice (core competencies, inventory of planning schools) is an opportunity for Seoul's urban planning data and methodologies to enter the framework of international comparison. Second, the "connection between education and practice" emphasized by UN-Habitat and GPEAN overlaps with our own task of linking research institutes, universities, and the field. Third, the fact that the force sustaining 25 years was a "network of trust across borders" leaves open the question of what role Seoul will play in the international planning network.

With this, the eight-part detailed record of the WPSC 2026 plenary comes to a close. Starting from the digital transformation of the opening, and passing through the student competition, UN-Habitat's housing agenda, Libby Porter's decolonizing planning, the panel discussion redefining the future, and on to the 25th anniversary closing, this congress returned to the academic community as a whole the question of whether planning can still create a just and livable world.

Source: WPSC 2026 closing plenary (afternoon of July 3, 2026, University of Helsinki main building), online streaming vimeo.com/event/5991955. The text and quotations are based on a transcript of the streaming (faster-whisper), and the photos are screen captures from the same streaming.