Book excerpt: Activist planning shows how communities, neighbourhoods and social movements use their own alternative spatial planning to oppose interventions from the government. This book is a systematic overview of scholarly reported activist planning cases. It includes descriptions of the various kinds of activist planning and contains a comprehensive bibliography of academic publications related to the 164 cases. The book informs the planning community what activist planning is in practice, and offers a classification scheme where all reported cases fit in. This text is needed because no comprehensive collection of activist planning cases exists, nor does a classification comprising all types of activist planning. There is, to date, no database of cases and associated literature providing researchers and students with an authoritative source. The search for cases in the English language has been global, and the cases and 122 supplementary examples are sorted by country and world region ‒ Australasia, Europe, the Global South and North America.