A multitude of concepts and ideas have shaped practices in professions such as planning, urban design and urban management. Now, however, the speed and intensity with which these ideas travel seems historically unprecedented. This paper explores how some of these ideas are formed and circulated, often with unpredictable consequences. In order to understand the circulation and impact of these ideas this paper constructs an analytical framework which views these concepts within wider networks of social agents and institutions. Using insights from actor-network theory and discourse analysis we propose a framework that focuses our understanding of how ideas are translated into new spatial settings. The examples of the urban village and the business improvement district will be used to explicate the analytical framework. In concluding, the paper assesses the utility of the analytic framework in explaining the travel of planning ideas.

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In neoliberal democracies, regulatory planning systems are often characterized by tension between (1) efforts to treat developers as consumers and (2) the regulatory aspect of planning, frequently involving decisions that sacrifice individual interests in favor of a collective but ill-defined “public interest.” This unresolved tension creates a crisis of trust, as the underlying values of the planning system are rarely made explicit. Using an ethnographic methodology to investigate the embedded nature of trust relationships in one planning office, this article suggests that the prerequisite for invigorating trust in planning is a careful and coherent theorization of the relationship of individual to collective interests.

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The ontological status of historic buildings has until recently been little explored, particularly in relation to their conservation. This is curious, for the assumed status and existence of buildings have critical impacts upon our attempts to conserve them. Conventional conservation thought has conceived buildings as solid objects constructed under the gaze of a single architect and retaining exemplar properties worth preserving. This paper offers an alternative and novel conceptualisation of buildings in time and space, drawing on the naturalistic ontology of Jubien and combining this with actor-network theory to explore how buildings might be conceived as multiple things with variant but persisting properties (some of which may be worthy of conservation). Using the moment of post-1945 reconstruction, we explore conservation of the architecture and spaces of Exeter (UK) to consider three objects, their nature, persistence, properties, and formation. Doing so reveals the multiplicity of material and social objects that may become entwined in attempts to conserve these buildings. Things such as ‘views’ become reconsidered as multiply constructed, with variant nonessential parts. The paper concludes that conservation practice requires a more heterogeneous understanding of these objects, how they are formed, and the potential for their social and material hybridity.

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Smellscape has increasingly attracted attentions across disciplines. However, little research provides a model to help understand the perceptual qualities of smellscapes. This paper, taking pleasantness as a perceptual quality dimension, aimed to explore indicators influencing people's pleasantness of smellscapes in a selected case. People's natural speaking language was used as resources to understand their perceptions. Grounded Theory was used as a methodological approach in this study in a selected case. Nineteen participants were recruited for smell walking with semi-structured interviews. Overall, nine indicators emerged from participants' descriptions which contribute to their smellscape pleasantness: cleanliness, preference, appropriateness, naturalness, freshness, familiarity, calmness, intensity and purity. Meanwhile, four types of pleasantness were found according to dominant indicators: preference dominated, healthiness dominated, memories and habituation dominated and context dominated. A perceptual model has been developed based on the indicators which can be used to classify smellscapes through their dominant perceptual features and evaluate smellscape qualities based on pleasantness.

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