Karel Van den Berghe

Potentials of Entrepreneurial Thinking for Planning: Debates during the 11th AESOP Young Academics Conference

Abstract Between 10 and 13 April 2017, the 11th AESOP Young Academics Conference took place at the Technical University of Munich on the theme of “Planning and Entrepreneurship – Planning and Public Policy at the Intersection of Top-down and Bottom-up Action”. The conference’s aim was to seek to understand (i) how planners can shape conditions so that young enterprises and innovative local activism can thrive and (ii) how planners themselves can benefit by integrating entrepreneurial thinking into their routines. The bandwidth of papers resembled the breadth of planning as a discipline gathered under the AESOP umbrella. Several bridges connecting planning and entrepreneurship became apparent, among them that (i) planning can provide an ecosystem for entrepreneurial activities that support local economies, providing a liveable environment for communities, (ii) planning approaches should succeed in incorporating the demands from market-based entrepreneurialism while creating a different and inclusive form of planning, and (iii) planners should support, and become, “hackers” and social entrepreneurs.