This article/manifesto advances a programmatic call to reorient planning history toward a more critical, politically engaged, and epistemologically innovative paradigm. While spatial planning has long grounded its legitimacy in claims to serve the public interest and improve conditions for vulnerable populations, the author argues that mainstream planning history has failed to systematically interrogate these claims or foreground questions of social justice. Dominant grand narratives, often rooted in intellectual and institutional history, privilege ideas, paradigms, and professional actors while marginalizing the lived experiences, struggles, and agency of subaltern groups.

Sevilla-Buitrago identifies functionalist and empiricist tendencies as key limitations, noting the field’s relative insulation from theoretical innovation and its weak engagement with broader debates in urban studies and the social sciences. In response, he proposes “radical planning history” as a comprehensive alternative framework. Drawing inspiration from radical planning, radical history, and critical urban theory, this approach advances four core commitments: (1) a history of the present that reads the past through contemporary urban conflicts; (2) a history from below that centers grassroots perspectives and community agency; (3) a history of the possible that uncovers suppressed or unrealized emancipatory trajectories; and (4) an epistemological renewal grounded in conceptual experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Radical planning history operates through a dual strategy: critically reassessing planning’s actual socio-spatial impacts—particularly on vulnerable populations—while also reconstructing traditions of insurgent and community-led urbanism. Ultimately, the project seeks to cultivate a renewed historical consciousness capable of informing transformative planning practice and contributing to broader struggles for more equitable and democratic urban futures.