Rydin, Yvonne | UK/Sweden

Yvonne Rydin is Professor of Planning, Environment and Public Policy at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. Prior to 2006, she worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science for 16 years in the Department of Geography and Environment. She holds a BA in Land Economy from Cambridge University and a PhD in Regional and Urban Planning Studies from LSE. Yvonne is a multi-disciplinary social scientist focussing on governance for sustainability, particularly at the urban scale. She engages with theories from political science, economics and sociology, with a strong interest in developing planning theory. Her research has operationalised governance and governmentality theories, as well as discourse analysis, social constructivism and actor-network theory. She is particularly interested in the construction and warranting of knowledge claims and how these impact on and are implicated in planning practices. This has been explored in a variety of policy domains relevant to planning, including sustainability indicators, renewable energy infrastructure, urban energy projects, air pollution, green and blue space management and urban development more generally. She has held a number of research grants from UK research councils and the European Commission and acted as an advisor to the UK Government.
 

Project at IAS-STS: 

In 2013 I published The Future of Planning: beyond growth dependence (Bristol: Policy Press) in which I argued that planning systems had become not just oriented towards promoting growth, but dependent on such growth to deliver on their goals. In recent years, this argument has become situated within a burgeoning literature on de-growth and post-growth, which argues that such growth will need to be curtailed in order to stay within planetary boundaries. My new book, Planning without Growth (Bristol: Policy Press) explores these arguments and also alternative ways of delivering sustainable livelihoods, building on new ways of understanding the 'economy'. This is part of an attempt to develop a new form of post-growth planning. I am now engaged in considering the implications of such post-growth thinking from the viewpoint of planning as a knowledge-based activity. In addition to considering the new forms of economic knowledge that are required, I am examining the implications for knowing about communities and also various technologies. I aim to use my time at IAS-STS to learn more about how knowledge of current sustainable technologies is being framed in a variety of contexts and consider how this can be integrated into a broader theory of planning knowledge.

Selected Publications:

Rydin, Y. (2025) Planning Without Growth (Bristol: Policy Press)

Durrant, D., Lamker, C. and Rydin, Y. (2023) "The Potential of Post-Growth Planning: Re-Tooling the Planning Profession for Moving Beyond Growth" Planning Theory and Practice Online at:https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2023.2198876

Rydin, Y., Beauregard, R., Cremaschi, M. and Lieto, L. (eds) (2021) Regulation and Planning: practice, institutions, materiality (New York: Routledge)

Rydin Y. (2021) Theory in Planning Research (London: Macmillan)

Rydin, Y. (2019) "Silences, categories and black-boxes: towards an analytics of the relations of power in planning regulation" Planning Theory Vol. 19 No. 2 pp. 214-233