ABSTRACT
Today, the world is in the most serious turmoil it has experienced for many centuries. Multiple crises have arisen from the fundamental mistreatment by capitalist competition of the carrying capacity of the planet. Even before coronavirus, evidently morbid symptoms of over-development led many spatial planners to write of the threat of a new Dark Age. Many advocated a return to policy decentralisation as the Covid-19 crisis demonstrated once again the failure of ‘global controller’ mindsets to manage complex systems successfully. In the first nine chapters of this book, a mapping of key elements of the prevailing omni-crisis are summarised. These range from an exegesis of the Anthropocene, the rise of populism, the transition to neoliberalist anti-planning, and migration as planning issues with pleas for evolutionary change in spatial policy and process dynamics. Finally, a group of chapters explores the flailings as territorial governances tried to plot the rise of creative cities, 4.0 era industry and services and, in the built form, the role of ‘starchitects’ in city renewal. In the last part of the book, attention is devoted to territorial innovation, knowledge recombination, sustainable mobility and, finally, green entrepreneurship and leadership, as necessary elements of a post-coronavirus set of climate change mitigation and sustainable mobility survival strategies.
