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 New President and Vice President of IPHS Announced

At the concluding session of the 19th IPHS International Conference in July 2022, new leadership of the IPHS was announced: president—Prof. Carola Hein, TU Delft; vice president—Prof. Ian Morley, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Both scholars are ardent advocates and promoters of planning history research and education. Dr Christine Garnaut, the ex-president in 2018–2022, has made tremendous efforts and contribution in serving and advancing the international planning history community in the difficult global circumstances. IPHS will continue and strengthen its commitment to encouraging research into planning history and the dissemination of research findings.


 20th IPHS Conference, July 2024, Hong Kong

The 20th IPHS Biennial Conference is to be held in early-July 2024 in Hong Kong. As Asia’s World City, Hong Kong offers a unique entry point to variant narratives of planning in the past, and against this backdrop core themes of the conference will be port city developments, colonial urban planning, postcolonial planning dynamics, new towns, regions and regional planning in history, cities and the natural environment, and city planning in high-density urban contexts. A number of sub-themes will also be incorporated into the 2024 event, including: planning within global cities; city development in SE Asia and other Asian regions; the history of urbanization and planning in the Chinese context; public housing; community planning and health; transport planning; city planning and heritage; and, Planning History pedagogy.


Co-convenors of the 20th IPHS Biennial Conference, Profs. Ian Morley and Hendrik Tieben, welcome you to visit Hong Kong in July 2024!


Professor Stephen V. Ward Received the Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement in Planning History at the 19th IPHS Conference 2022

The Sir Peter Hall Award recognizes sustained excellence for a body of published work that has made an outstanding contribution to international scholarship and conveyed the relevance of planning history to contemporary planning challenges.

Over the course of his career, Stephen Ward has produced a distinguished series of books that have significantly advanced the field of planning history. Early contributions included: the extension of his doctoral research in The Geography of Interwar Britain: The state and uneven development (1988); his important edited collection The Garden City: Past, present, future (1992), which drew together international perspectives on garden city practice and ideology; Planning and Urban Change (1994, second edition 2004), a textbook which demonstrated that a thorough understanding of planning history needs to be at the heart of planning studies; and Place Promotion (1994), an historically-informed study of what was then emerging as a more market-oriented dimension of planning throughout the world. He built on these foundations with three further single-authored monographs: Selling Places (1998), a well-received study that supplied further historical insight into the neo-liberalisation of planning; Planning the Twentieth-Century City (2002), a sweeping and authoritative account of planning’s development in the advanced capitalist world; and The Peaceful Path: Building Garden Cities and New Towns (2016), the definitive story of how this major strand in international planning history was realised within its original Hertfordshire ‘heartland’ in Britain. Stephen’s conceptual and empirical illumination of the international diffusion of modern planning ideas is particularly noteworthy. The impact of all his contributions has been amplified and extended by research works and commentaries appearing in landmark edited collections and in leading journals including Town Planning Review, Planning Perspectives, International Planning Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory and Practice, and Town and Country Planning.

Throughout his career, Stephen Ward has played significant roles in the infrastructure of organisations, journals and networks supporting planning history.  In 1974 he became a founder member of the History of Planning Group, later the Planning History Group (PHG), precursor of the present International Planning History Society (IPHS). Serving as Meetings Secretary, Secretary-General, a Councillor and notably as President (1996-2002), he has been directly involved in commissioning, organising and supporting its international conferences since the late 1980s. He edited both Planning History (the PHG/IPHS journal, now incorporated as the IPHS section of Planning Perspectives), and Planning Perspectives itself between 2001 and 2006. These various roles and associated professional activities – notably as an invited keynote speaker – have placed Stephen in a central networking position in the planning history world, from which he has helped to shape the broader development of the field beyond his own research contributions.


 19th IPHS Conference, 5–6 July 2022, Delft (Hybrid), The Netherlands

The 19th biennial International Planning History Society (IPHS) conference took place 5–6 July 2022 as a hybrid event. The conference program consisted of diverse events, which included a keynote lecture, research panels of presentations, and book talks. Please visit the conference website and the conference proceedings.


IPHS Spotlight on Emerging Research and Researchers in Planning History

Tianchen Dai
Dinalva D. Roldan
Kaiyi Zhu

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Publish with Planning Perspectives

Planning Perspectives is the journal of IPHS. Editors John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold introduce the journal, and share seven rules of getting published in it.


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