Mick Lennon
Biographic Data
| ID | 4269693 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mick Lennon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mick |
| FAMILY NAME | Lennon |
| SIGNATURE | LENNON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8613-092X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Steering compact growth through national planning frameworks: Challenges and constraints in Ireland
Green spaces in informal settlements: Planning failures and green infrastructure loss in Amirieh, Iran
This paper examines the interactions between planning systems, legal frameworks and green infrastructure (GI) assets in informal settlements by analysing the case of Amirieh, Iran. It seeks to address gaps in the literature by examining how, despite the importance of promoting sustainable development in informal urban contexts, planning dynamics may contribute to the degradation of GI in rapidly urbanising areas. Using a qualitative research appr…
Rights of Nature and Planning: More Trouble Than It’s Worth
Proponents of the Rights of Nature (RoN) believe that the environmental crisis is rooted in how the law is profiled by human interests. They seek to redress this by decentring humans in legislation
Diagnosing difficulties in the delivery of multifunctional urban parks
Urban parks are key elements of green infrastructure (GI), expected to deliver multifunctional benefits within limited urban land. Multifunctionality, a central GI principle celebrated in theory, remains underexplored in terms of conflicts it may generate. This paper examines the practical challenges of maximizing multifunctionality through qualitative research in four Dublin parks. Two overarching challenges are identified: spatial competition a…
Mark Dobson and Gavin Parker, Slow Planning? Timescapes, Power and Democracy
This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The first revision to Ireland’s National Planning Framework: An environmental turn
Ireland’s National Planning Framework (NPF) was adopted in 2018. The ‘First Revision’ to the NPF was published in April 2025. This revision updates the NPF during a period of multiple challenges. Appreciating the content and consequences of what this revision entails is central to understanding the direction of travel for Irish planning. In this Practice Review, we update our previous paper in Planning Practice and Research, which reviewed the in…
Epistemic injustice in planning: A Framework for Identifying Degrees of Harm
The primary objective of this paper is to nuance our understanding of how a knowledge-centred injustice can manifest in planning. To do so, the paper draws upon the concept of “epistemic injustice” from the field of social epistemology. Epistemic injustice occurs when certain voices are unjustly discredited and/or systemically marginalised. Recognising and addressing epistemic injustice is crucial as it can generate unjust harms in planning decis…
The Biodiversity Crisis – Planning for Nature Recovery: Edited by Mark Scott and Gavin Parker
The Biodiversity Crisis and Emerging Roles for PlanningMark Scott and Gavin ParkerThe Global Biodiversity ChallengeMeri Juntti, Joshua Castellino and Oscar ForeroPlanning and Biodiversity Net Gain
Green infrastructure inequalities in informal settlements
A growing number of cities are turning to green infrastructure as a way to manage climate change, nature recovery and unsustainable development. Although such an approach has been at the centre of thinking about development in many cities in the global North, there have been few interventions in cities of the global South. Only recently have scholars paid attention to how uneven land-use regulations in greening approaches toward informal settleme…
Planning and the Post-Pandemic City
The Covid-19 pandemic has left society dazed and confused. Self-evidently momentous, its multifaceted impacts upon the functioning and experience of city living have been swift and deep. This has precipitated a range of laudable research in planning, which, among other foci, has sought to examine how the disruption is amplifying inequities (Cole et al., 2020), improving urban environmental quality (Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020) and generatin…
Spatial imaginaries in flood risk management: Insights from a managed retreat initiative in upper Bavaria
Recent decades have witnessed a shift to spatial perspectives in flood risk management. It is recognized that flood protection has substantial implications for land-use plans and requires attention to the functional geographies of river basins, catchments and floodplains. It is against this background that managed retreat is increasingly identified as a viable cost-effective response to flood risk. Yet managed retreat is also a political act, inv…
Executive control network resting state fMRI functional and effective connectivity and delay discounting in cocaine dependent subjects compared to healthy controls
Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to study functional connectivity of brain networks in addictions. However, most studies to-date have focused on the default mode network (DMN) with fewer studies assessing the executive control network (ECN) and salience network (SN), despite well-documented cognitive executive behavioral deficits in addictions. The present study assessed the functional and effective connect…
Empowering the public in environmental assessment: Advances or enduring challenges
Public participation is a cornerstone of good plan-making and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), allowing local information and concerns to be captured, residents to be engaged in assessment and plan-making processes, and opposition to plan implementation to be reduced. Effective public participation in SEA depends on who is involved, how they are involved, and what influence they have over the SEA and plan-making processes. Using this who…
Citizen science and environmental justice: Exploring contradictory outcomes through a case study of air quality monitoring in Dublin
Citizen science is advocated as a response to a broad range of contemporary societal and ecological challenges. However, there are widely varying models of citizen science which may either challenge or reinforce existing knowledge paradigms and associated power dynamics. This paper explores different approaches to citizen science in the context of air quality monitoring in terms of their implications for environmental justice. This is achieved th…
Managed retreat and coastal climate change adaptation: The environmental justice implications and value of a coproduction approach
Flood risk management, (un)managed retreat and the “relocation fix”: Examining shifting responsibilities and compounding risks through two Irish case studies
Managed retreat raises important questions of both risk and responsibility. These include what risks are addressed and/or exacerbated through retreat and whether retreat might function as a byword for state withdrawal and the individualisation of responsibility. In response, the aim of this paper is to understand the implications of shifts in the perceived balance of responsibilities between the state and private actors for managing the risks and…
Managed retreat in response to flooding: Lessons from the past for contemporary climate change adaptation
Managed retreat is increasingly advocated as a means to promote resilience and adaptation to climate change. However, there are various uncertainties and challenges associated with the impacts of displacement and attachments to place. In this context, it is useful to study past examples of relocation to understand how these challenges have been addressed. This paper draws on a case study relocation scheme which took place in Ireland following maj…
Planning as Justification
Much theorising in our field is focused on what planning should do. Such work is generally informed by perspectives borrowed from social and political theory that are used as an analytical lens to examine where planning practice has gone wrong and as a platform to prescribe how planning should be corrected to deliver better ends. For example, the work of Dewey and Habermas has deeply influenced the communicative and collaborative approaches to pl…
Climate Disruption and Planning: Resistance or Retreat
Mark Scott and Mick LennonSchool of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, Dublin, IrelandClimate change is one of the most challenging scientific and political i
The art of inclusion: Phenomenology, placemaking and the role of the arts
This paper extends emerging research on the role of the arts in placemaking by introducing readers to the theories of Hannah Arendt. Specifically, it outlines the value of an Arendtian phenomenological framework for conceiving why, how and in what ways ‘inclusion’ could and should operate in placemaking. The paper first presents an outline of Arendt’s phenomenological approach. An exploratory case study of arts activities in a rural Irish town is…
On issues of plurality and practice in considering planning’s public interest
The ‘public interest’ has waxed and waned as a concept of concern in planning theory over the years. Even when not explicitly under discussion, it is often implicitly present beneath other monikers, such as ‘justice’, ‘rights’ or ‘capabilities’ (Basta, 2015, 2017; Fainstein, 2010; Lennon et al., 2019). Indeed, as the public interest is conventionally considered the raison d’être legitimising planning activity, it would be difficult for things to …
Responsive environments: An outline of a method for determining context sensitive planning interventions to enhance health and wellbeing
The Dynamics of Justification in Policy Reform: Insights from Water Policy Debates in Ireland
Policy reform can be complex and fraught with contending arguments. Although much research has been conducted into the politics of coalition formation, less attention has been devoted to legitimating logics in policy reform. Drawing on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, this exploratory study addresses this deficit by examining the influence of justifications deployed in policy debates. The paper analyses the role of shifting reasoning in conten…
The values and vulnerabilities of ‘Star Wars Island’: Exploring tensions in the sustainable management of the Skellig Michael World Heritage Site
This paper explores challenges in reconciling the cultural, economic and ecological pillars of the sustainable development concept. It does so by examining how conflicts in the management of an island off the Irish coast called Skellig Michael, which has been internationally designated for its significant cultural and ecological attributes, have been intensified by: (a) increasing tourist numbers; (b) a re-framing of the site’s identity and (c) c…
Ireland’s New National Planning Framework: (Re)Balancing and (Re)Conceiving Planning for the Twenty-First Century
This article examines the recent evolution of national spatial planning in Ireland, focusing on the recent publication of National Planning Framework (NPF) in 2018. The NPF is Ireland’s second national strategy for spatial development and represents a further shift away from traditional land-use regulation towards broader-based strategic spatial planning. In this commentary, we reflect on official perspectives regarding the role that planning sho…
Green space benefits for health and well-being: A life-course approach for urban planning, design and management
Managed retreat and coastal climate change adaptation: The environmental justice implications and value of a coproduction approach
Opportunity or Threat: Dissecting Tensions in a Post-Carbon Rural Transition
The deployment of renewable energy technologies represents a highly visible and contested indicator of rural change in terms of the function and appearance of rural places. In this article, we examine how notions of rurality and place intersect with macro-level objectives for reducing carbon emissions, and how competing storylines underpin opposing and supporting coalitions in the deployment of wind energy projects. The article explores a series …
On ‘the subject’ of planning’s public interest
The ‘public interest’ has long been used as a concept to justify planning activity. However, attempts to specify how to determine the public interest have been so plagued with problems that the concept has been effectively abandoned by academia in recent years. This article stresses the ongoing relevance of the public interest concept in planning but does so in a way that reconceives what it entails. This article argues that central to the concep…
Green infrastructure inequalities in informal settlements
A growing number of cities are turning to green infrastructure as a way to manage climate change, nature recovery and unsustainable development. Although such an approach has been at the centre of thinking about development in many cities in the global North, there have been few interventions in cities of the global South. Only recently have scholars paid attention to how uneven land-use regulations in greening approaches toward informal settleme…
Finding Purpose in Planning
This article presents a novel interpretive approach to advancing knowledge of how practitioners locate purpose in their practice and how this in turn influences their practice. The approach is formulated by drawing upon and integrating the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre with the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricouer. The article argues that this approach offers insight into the important role of narrative in producing self-understandin…
Presentation and persuasion: The meaning of evidence in Irish green infrastructure policy
This paper examines how meaning making influences the content and currency of the evidence used to shape and support policy proposals. It does this by answering three linked questions: (1) How does context influence the forms of evidence employed in policy advocacy? (2) What practices are initiated by reference to the perceived need for evidence in policy formulation? (3) What effects do these practices have on the location of power within policy…
The emergence of green infrastructure as promoting the centralisation of a landscape perspective in spatial planning—the case of Ireland
The ‘landscape’ approach to planning and design has long since advanced a social–ecological perspective that conceives ecosystems health and human well-being as mutually constitutive. However, conventional public sector organisational arrangements segregate and discretely administer development issues, thereby militating against the holistic viewpoint necessary to redress the entwined nature of complex planning issues. The emergence and continuin…
Epistemic injustice in planning: A Framework for Identifying Degrees of Harm
The primary objective of this paper is to nuance our understanding of how a knowledge-centred injustice can manifest in planning. To do so, the paper draws upon the concept of “epistemic injustice” from the field of social epistemology. Epistemic injustice occurs when certain voices are unjustly discredited and/or systemically marginalised. Recognising and addressing epistemic injustice is crucial as it can generate unjust harms in planning decis…
Empowering the public in environmental assessment: Advances or enduring challenges
Public participation is a cornerstone of good plan-making and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), allowing local information and concerns to be captured, residents to be engaged in assessment and plan-making processes, and opposition to plan implementation to be reduced. Effective public participation in SEA depends on who is involved, how they are involved, and what influence they have over the SEA and plan-making processes. Using this who…
Morality, power and the planning subject
Ethical issues are at the heart of planning. Thus, planning theory has long displayed an interest in debating both the ethical justification for planning and how the activity of planning can be rendered more ethically sensitive. However, comparatively little attention has been shown to how the very constitution of the planner as a ‘moral subject’ may be ethically problematic for planning practice. This article addresses this lacuna through an eng…
Presentation and persuasion: The meaning of evidence in Irish green infrastructure policy
This paper examines how meaning making influences the content and currency of the evidence used to shape and support policy proposals. It does this by answering three linked questions: (1) How does context influence the forms of evidence employed in policy advocacy? (2) What practices are initiated by reference to the perceived need for evidence in policy formulation? (3) What effects do these practices have on the location of power within policy…
Finding Purpose in Planning
This article presents a novel interpretive approach to advancing knowledge of how practitioners locate purpose in their practice and how this in turn influences their practice. The approach is formulated by drawing upon and integrating the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre with the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricouer. The article argues that this approach offers insight into the important role of narrative in producing self-understandin…
On ‘the subject’ of planning’s public interest
The ‘public interest’ has long been used as a concept to justify planning activity. However, attempts to specify how to determine the public interest have been so plagued with problems that the concept has been effectively abandoned by academia in recent years. This article stresses the ongoing relevance of the public interest concept in planning but does so in a way that reconceives what it entails. This article argues that central to the concep…
Morality, power and the planning subject
Ethical issues are at the heart of planning. Thus, planning theory has long displayed an interest in debating both the ethical justification for planning and how the activity of planning can be rendered more ethically sensitive. However, comparatively little attention has been shown to how the very constitution of the planner as a ‘moral subject’ may be ethically problematic for planning practice. This article addresses this lacuna through an eng…
Green space benefits for health and well-being: A life-course approach for urban planning, design and management
The emergence of green infrastructure as promoting the centralisation of a landscape perspective in spatial planning—the case of Ireland
The ‘landscape’ approach to planning and design has long since advanced a social–ecological perspective that conceives ecosystems health and human well-being as mutually constitutive. However, conventional public sector organisational arrangements segregate and discretely administer development issues, thereby militating against the holistic viewpoint necessary to redress the entwined nature of complex planning issues. The emergence and continuin…
Opportunity or Threat: Dissecting Tensions in a Post-Carbon Rural Transition
The deployment of renewable energy technologies represents a highly visible and contested indicator of rural change in terms of the function and appearance of rural places. In this article, we examine how notions of rurality and place intersect with macro-level objectives for reducing carbon emissions, and how competing storylines underpin opposing and supporting coalitions in the deployment of wind energy projects. The article explores a series …
The Dynamics of Justification in Policy Reform: Insights from Water Policy Debates in Ireland
Policy reform can be complex and fraught with contending arguments. Although much research has been conducted into the politics of coalition formation, less attention has been devoted to legitimating logics in policy reform. Drawing on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, this exploratory study addresses this deficit by examining the influence of justifications deployed in policy debates. The paper analyses the role of shifting reasoning in conten…
The values and vulnerabilities of ‘Star Wars Island’: Exploring tensions in the sustainable management of the Skellig Michael World Heritage Site
This paper explores challenges in reconciling the cultural, economic and ecological pillars of the sustainable development concept. It does so by examining how conflicts in the management of an island off the Irish coast called Skellig Michael, which has been internationally designated for its significant cultural and ecological attributes, have been intensified by: (a) increasing tourist numbers; (b) a re-framing of the site’s identity and (c) c…
Ireland’s New National Planning Framework: (Re)Balancing and (Re)Conceiving Planning for the Twenty-First Century
This article examines the recent evolution of national spatial planning in Ireland, focusing on the recent publication of National Planning Framework (NPF) in 2018. The NPF is Ireland’s second national strategy for spatial development and represents a further shift away from traditional land-use regulation towards broader-based strategic spatial planning. In this commentary, we reflect on official perspectives regarding the role that planning sho…
On issues of plurality and practice in considering planning’s public interest
The ‘public interest’ has waxed and waned as a concept of concern in planning theory over the years. Even when not explicitly under discussion, it is often implicitly present beneath other monikers, such as ‘justice’, ‘rights’ or ‘capabilities’ (Basta, 2015, 2017; Fainstein, 2010; Lennon et al., 2019). Indeed, as the public interest is conventionally considered the raison d’être legitimising planning activity, it would be difficult for things to …
Responsive environments: An outline of a method for determining context sensitive planning interventions to enhance health and wellbeing
Planning as Justification
Much theorising in our field is focused on what planning should do. Such work is generally informed by perspectives borrowed from social and political theory that are used as an analytical lens to examine where planning practice has gone wrong and as a platform to prescribe how planning should be corrected to deliver better ends. For example, the work of Dewey and Habermas has deeply influenced the communicative and collaborative approaches to pl…
Climate Disruption and Planning: Resistance or Retreat
Mark Scott and Mick LennonSchool of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, Dublin, IrelandClimate change is one of the most challenging scientific and political i
The art of inclusion: Phenomenology, placemaking and the role of the arts
This paper extends emerging research on the role of the arts in placemaking by introducing readers to the theories of Hannah Arendt. Specifically, it outlines the value of an Arendtian phenomenological framework for conceiving why, how and in what ways ‘inclusion’ could and should operate in placemaking. The paper first presents an outline of Arendt’s phenomenological approach. An exploratory case study of arts activities in a rural Irish town is…
Flood risk management, (un)managed retreat and the “relocation fix”: Examining shifting responsibilities and compounding risks through two Irish case studies
Managed retreat raises important questions of both risk and responsibility. These include what risks are addressed and/or exacerbated through retreat and whether retreat might function as a byword for state withdrawal and the individualisation of responsibility. In response, the aim of this paper is to understand the implications of shifts in the perceived balance of responsibilities between the state and private actors for managing the risks and…
Managed retreat in response to flooding: Lessons from the past for contemporary climate change adaptation
Managed retreat is increasingly advocated as a means to promote resilience and adaptation to climate change. However, there are various uncertainties and challenges associated with the impacts of displacement and attachments to place. In this context, it is useful to study past examples of relocation to understand how these challenges have been addressed. This paper draws on a case study relocation scheme which took place in Ireland following maj…
Citizen science and environmental justice: Exploring contradictory outcomes through a case study of air quality monitoring in Dublin
Citizen science is advocated as a response to a broad range of contemporary societal and ecological challenges. However, there are widely varying models of citizen science which may either challenge or reinforce existing knowledge paradigms and associated power dynamics. This paper explores different approaches to citizen science in the context of air quality monitoring in terms of their implications for environmental justice. This is achieved th…
Managed retreat and coastal climate change adaptation: The environmental justice implications and value of a coproduction approach
Planning and the Post-Pandemic City
The Covid-19 pandemic has left society dazed and confused. Self-evidently momentous, its multifaceted impacts upon the functioning and experience of city living have been swift and deep. This has precipitated a range of laudable research in planning, which, among other foci, has sought to examine how the disruption is amplifying inequities (Cole et al., 2020), improving urban environmental quality (Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020) and generatin…
Spatial imaginaries in flood risk management: Insights from a managed retreat initiative in upper Bavaria
Recent decades have witnessed a shift to spatial perspectives in flood risk management. It is recognized that flood protection has substantial implications for land-use plans and requires attention to the functional geographies of river basins, catchments and floodplains. It is against this background that managed retreat is increasingly identified as a viable cost-effective response to flood risk. Yet managed retreat is also a political act, inv…
Executive control network resting state fMRI functional and effective connectivity and delay discounting in cocaine dependent subjects compared to healthy controls
Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to study functional connectivity of brain networks in addictions. However, most studies to-date have focused on the default mode network (DMN) with fewer studies assessing the executive control network (ECN) and salience network (SN), despite well-documented cognitive executive behavioral deficits in addictions. The present study assessed the functional and effective connect…
Empowering the public in environmental assessment: Advances or enduring challenges
Public participation is a cornerstone of good plan-making and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), allowing local information and concerns to be captured, residents to be engaged in assessment and plan-making processes, and opposition to plan implementation to be reduced. Effective public participation in SEA depends on who is involved, how they are involved, and what influence they have over the SEA and plan-making processes. Using this who…
The Biodiversity Crisis – Planning for Nature Recovery: Edited by Mark Scott and Gavin Parker
The Biodiversity Crisis and Emerging Roles for PlanningMark Scott and Gavin ParkerThe Global Biodiversity ChallengeMeri Juntti, Joshua Castellino and Oscar ForeroPlanning and Biodiversity Net Gain
Green infrastructure inequalities in informal settlements
A growing number of cities are turning to green infrastructure as a way to manage climate change, nature recovery and unsustainable development. Although such an approach has been at the centre of thinking about development in many cities in the global North, there have been few interventions in cities of the global South. Only recently have scholars paid attention to how uneven land-use regulations in greening approaches toward informal settleme…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Geography (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Business (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Engineering (8 works) · Environmental planning (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (8 works)