The 21^st Biennial Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS) will be held July 19-23, 2026, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Atlanta is one of the most important commercial, financial, and transportation centers of the southeastern United States, with a regional population of more than six million, spanning more than 6,000 square miles (15,540 sq km). 

Once an international shorthand for the generic post-war US sprawl city, Atlanta has alternately been described as the “City in Forest,” and the new “Black Mecca,” attracting the once-fleeing African-American migrants from other parts of the country back to its revived cultural center. Now Atlanta is on the rise, with downtown development, neighborhood planning, and a culture projected around the world through film, music, and television shows. The city is a banking center and boasts the third-largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the country. Its architecture includes work by John Portman, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph.

Atlanta’s planning history was broadly shaped by race relations and the civil rights movement, water management, growth boosterism, and transportation infrastructure. The city was founded in 1837 as the last station of the Western & Atlantic railroad line (Atlanta the feminine of Atlantic), nicknamed ‘Terminus’ for its rail origin. Today the city remains a transportation hub, with its Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport serving as the world's busiest in daily passenger flights.

Today, Atlanta is at a crossroads. Can it live up to the promise of a thriving, resilient, just, and open city that people have returned to seeking? Can it collectively combine that promise with Dr. King’s dream? Can it protect and preserve the historic fabric of its traditional neighborhoods amidst this change? These are familiar questions for the US South: How to conjugate Old and New? If the past is ever-present, how can the past be repaired? How can the past be guided, corrected, respected, educated, and planned for into a commonly envisioned, articulated, and realized future?

We invite urban and regional planning scholars from around the world to join us in Atlanta in the summer 2026 to address the pressing and urgent challenges of past, present, and future in our vital city of Atlanta.

The International Planning History Society (IPHS) was inaugurated in 1993 as a successor association to the Planning History Group (PHG), which was a British-based organization founded in 1974. Today, the Society’s membership of individuals and institutions drawn from over 30 countries, open to those supporting its objectives. The IPHS is an interdisciplinary Society with academic, postgraduate student and practitioner members drawn from the fields of planning, architecture, urban design, history, geography, sociology, politics, and related fields. The Society’s objectives are to promote and develop the subject field of planning history, to encourage research into planning history and the dissemination of research findings, and to provide opportunities for means of contact between members through organizing conferences, seminars, and meetings.