THE PLAN Journal (TPJ) is an open, inclusive, non-ideological and independent platform, founded on an ongoing praxis of criticality. The journal aims at disseminating and promoting innovative, thought-provoking and relevant research, studies and criticism in architecture, design and urbanism. In addition, the TPJ wants to enrich the dialog between research and the professional fields, in order to encourage both applicable new knowledge and intellectually driven and locally relevant modes of practice. With an overarching concern for recognizing quality research, the criteria for selecting contributions will be: innovation, clarity of purpose and method, and the potential transformational impact on disciplinary fields or the broader socio-cultural context.
Latest Articles
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Article
Common Walls: Shattering Barriers, Sharing Cities
VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 2 , Pages: 1 - 12 published: 2026-01-23As urbanization intensifies and global biodiversity declines at alarming rates, the project Common Walls responds to this ecological crisis by reimagining the building envelope as habitat infrastructure. Urban environments, often designed exclusively for human use, fragment ecosystems and create unwelcoming conditions for non-human species. Glass curtain walls, now widespread in city centers, are particularly harmful: they form invisible barriers that cause over a billion bird deaths annually in the US and contribute to light pollution and broader ecological disruption. Drawing on historical precedents in which architecture accommodated non-human life, this project proposes hempcrete as a regenerative alternative to conventional glazing systems. Hempcrete is a lightweight, carbon-negative material with excellent thermal performance. In Common Walls, a 1.5-foot-thick [457 mm] hempcrete cladding serves simultaneously as insulation and as multispecies habitat, supporting a range of pollinators. This approach argues for an expanded, more-than-human right to the city. Grounded in Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, the project embraces interconnectedness and advocates for architectural practices that cultivate the co-creation of livable urban environments for all forms of life.
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Article
Cultivating Resources and Inviting Heterogeneous Interests: The Limits of the Design Brief for a Resource Plant
VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 2 , Pages: 1 - 22 published: 2026-01-13As we become increasingly conscious of the entangled nature of human existence, we need to become more attuned to the needs of other species, and things on this planet we are bound to. This presents us with an opportunity to rethink in whose interest we approach architectural design, and to bring vital voices into the process that have – until now – been unable to make themselves heard. We conducted an experiment in a site in Varberg, Sweden, as part of a project to transform a wastewater treatment plant into a resource plant that includes the land itself as a resource. The focus of the experiment has been on testing methods to expand the notion of what a public space is and whom it is for. The experiment involved devising and testing two different methods for reading the site in terms of what it is and what it could become. The outcomes include both experiences and partial perspectives on both opportunities and the blind spots we still have.
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Article
Streetscape Ecologies in Southern Europe: Design for Culturally Rooted Nature-Based Regeneration
VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 2 , Pages: 1 - 27 published: 2025-12-17Urban streets are increasingly acknowledged as more than infrastructural corridors, serving as accessible and pervasive spaces where ecological processes and collective life unfold. In the context of climate change and ecological transition, cities worldwide are experimenting with nature-based street regeneration. Yet current research and practice often prioritize ecological performance metrics, overlooking the nuanced, spatially embedded, and culturally grounded processes through which urban nature evolves. This risk of homogenized solutions is particularly evident in Southern European cities, where layered urban fabrics and historically situated conceptions of nature have long shaped the interface between built form and ecology. This article argues that regenerating streetscapes in such contexts requires more than standardized interventions. Building on a three-year academic research project, it introduces a framework of ten cultural dimensions for culturally rooted nature-based solutions, tested across speculative and practice-based projects. Five operational lines of work are distilled, positioning streets as palimpsestic urban ecologies where ecological performance and cultural narratives converge. By aligning nature-based adaptation strategies with cultural sensitivity and spatial quality, the article advances pathways for resilient streetscape regeneration.
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Essay
Ecological Nature of the City: “Ecologicality”
VOLUME 10/2025 - Issue 2 , Pages: 1 - 18 published: 2025-12-16To enhance their resilience against global environmental and economic challenges, cities require an ecological upgrade that leverages the city as a key strategic scale for urban ecology. We must thus consider the ecological nature of the city from the vantage point of a complex adaptive system that has evolved its relationship with the natural environment over time due to various factors, including physical, structural, demographic, economic, and technological. Many strategies and interventions at different spatial scales have cast the city within a fixed image that risks reducing the city’s ecological nature to its physical dimension. To counteract reductionist framing, this paper adopts an eco-critical perspective, viewing the city as a hyperobject (as defined by Timothy Morton), which comprises five dimensions: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. The paper aims to unpack these five dimensions as they pertain to the ecological disposition of cities (i.e., their ecologicality), to pave the way for tackling the question of the naturalization of the city beyond a systems thinking approach of a regenerative paradigm to an assemblage thinking that grasps the hyperobjectivity of cities.
Featured Articles
Open Access
CRITICISM
Opinion
Interview with Kenneth Frampton
VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 1 , Pages: 9 - 33 published: 2024-02-06 Open Access
Position Paper
AI Time, Timing, and Timelessness
VOLUME 8/2023 - Issue 2 , Pages: 207 - 213 published: 2024-01-12 Open Access
Position Paper
Towards a Spatialized Model of Democracy
VOLUME 9/2024 - Issue 2 [DEMOCRATIC SPACE], Pages: 337 - 348 published: 2025-02-25This position paper describes diverse models of democracy in political philosophy and discusses how these models can produce the public spaces of the city. In late neoliberal western societies privatization of public space has greatly diminished the democratic infrastructure of our cities, and we have witnessed a corporatization and commercialization of the public realm. This paper contrasts public space in late neoliberal society in the West with public space in China. Since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reform era, China has seen a focus by communities and government on developing new public space and I argue that a civic, collaborative, community model of public space is emerging. I find that the focus on the creation of new community public spaces in China is a key tool towards its democratization and call for a radical democratic rethinking of public space as the space of democracy in the West. By thinking spatially about democracy, we can move towards a model where diverse models and practices co-exist.
Open Access
Position Paper
The Right to Housing: A Holistic Perspective. From Concept to Advocacy, Policy, and Practice
VOLUME 7/2022 - Issue 2 [The Right to Housing], Pages: 269 - 267 published: 2023-01-10 Open Access
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY STUDIES
Opinion
Baukultur in a Cybernetic Age: A Conversation
VOLUME 6/2021 - Issue 1 , Pages: 7 - 28 published: 2021-05-14We received and we gladly publish this conversation among distinguished theorists and scholars on an important topic, also aligned with the cross-disciplinary mission of our journal. [MS]
ABSTRACT - The article offers a multi-author conversation charting the future of architecture in light of the apparent tension between Baukultur, which combines the culture of building and the building of this culture, and the rapid changes brought about by digital technology, embracing cybernetics and artificial intelligence. The article builds on a discussion of Baukultur to debate in what sense buildings are “machines for living in,” then examines neuromorphic architecture wherein cybernetic mechanisms help buildings sense the needs of their occupants. It closes with an example of a building complex, Kampung Admiralty, that combines cybernetic opportunities with a pioneering approach to building “community and biophilia” into our cities. This article interleaves an abridged version of Michael Arbib’s (2019) article “Baukultur in a Cybernetic Age,” 1 with extensive comments by the co-authors.
