Contemporary planning theory is marked by persistent tensions: between is and ought, ethics and politics, the good and the just, and rights and obligations. This paper revisits those tensions by reading them through Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of being-with. Nancy refuses any metaphysical grounding of the human, community, or the good life, and instead understands existence as exposure, finitude, and coexistence. On this basis, the paper argues that planning ethics can be recast as an originary ethos—hence a praxis—of being-with, where responsibility is categorical yet incalculable and cannot be reduced to procedural correctness or settled foundations. The paper’s contribution is a set of eight theses that translate Nancy’s ontology into a post-foundational orientation for planning: not operational guidelines, but critical-ethical bearings for judgment, participation, and plan-making under conditions of plurality.
In the field of cultural planning, justice is an implicit theme without an actionable conceptual framework. Applying the principles of Social Ecology, and integrating Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad and Giddens’ Structuration Theory, we develop a framework for evaluating justice in cultural planning. This conceptual framework enables an understanding of the social processes and spatial experiences that shape the distribution and accessibility of cultural resources. In doing so, it has the potential to address the just allocation of cultural resources in the field of cultural planning and other urban planning fields.
Planning decisions routinely generate substantial economic value through land use regulation, infrastructure provision, and development rights, yet the translation of these gains into broader societal benefit remains fragmented and uneven. In this collection, we argue that value in urban planning must be understood as a multifaceted and institutionally embedded phenomenon shaped through legal frameworks, financial architectures, and planning practices. While planning scholarship has long examined social, spatial, environmental, and transformative values, and real estate research has focused predominantly on financial valuation and market mechanisms, these bodies of work rarely intersect in ways that allow for a shared understanding of how value is produced, governed, and distributed. The special issue addresses this gap by bringing together contributions that rethink the institutional foundations of value, examine the governance of capital flows and valuation practices, and explore how diverse values are mobilized within planning and development processes. Collectively, the articles demonstrate that value is not merely an outcome generated by markets and subsequently corrected through planning interventions, but a relational process actively constituted through governance arrangements, legal systems, financial conventions, and everyday planning practices. The introduction shifts the focus from narrow, project-based approaches to a broader understanding of planning as a strategic practice that shapes how value is defined, circulated, and redistributed across urban development processes. In doing so, the special issue positions planners not simply as regulators of development, but as active participants in governing the institutional conditions through which urban value is created and mobilized for societal benefit.
This paper examines how planning theory functions as a tool of environmental imagination in addressing sustainability challenges in the Global South. It reviews four planning theoretical traditions: collaborative planning, just sustainability, insurgent planning, and relational planning to show how theory shapes the framing, governance, and outcomes of sustainability interventions. Drawing on cases from Global South cities, the paper shows how planning interventions influence whose knowledge is recognized, how environmental risks are addressed, and which futures become actionable. It argues that planning theory remains central to sustainability practice when understood as an interpretive framework for navigating socio-ecological complexity, power struggle, and institutional constraint.
The critique of consensus within post-political literature has characterised the relationship between consensus and conflict as oppositional. Drawing on an in-depth re-reading of Habermasian theory of communicative action and a comparative inquiry in to the experience of planning practitioners in Amsterdam and Ankara informed by Forester’s critical pragmatism, we propose that the relationship between consensus and conflict is dynamic and mutually constitutive, rather than simply oppositional, with planners serving as expert authorities. In both cities, consensus is regarded as an alternative to authoritarian approaches in planning and as a mechanism for addressing citizens’ demands and disagreements. The findings further indicate that planners in Amsterdam actively pursue consensus-seeking, while those in Ankara encounter difficulties due to political pressure. Although there are challenges and limitations associated with this approach, the article concludes that discontinuing the use of consensus is not considered a viable option in local planning processes.
How do planners engage with the diverse temporalities that shape deliberative processes? Crucially, how might they address the hidden conflicts that this diversity can lead to? This paper advances what we term 'the Temporal Deliberation Approach', a flexible lens through which deliberative practitioners can identify new avenues for working with the multiple temporalities that participants bring to deliberative processes. Developed from observations from two planning cases, the Approach is informed by critical temporal scholarship, alongside emerging temporal scholarship from within the planning literature. We introduce a set of key processes and three capacities - temporal multi-layeredness, temporal empathy and temporal flexibility - which we argue can enhance pluralistic integrative deliberations.
This paper explores how ideas of value are put to work in the context of town centre regeneration. Taking a grounded theory approach, it presents a narrative account of the first post-war British New Town centre to be comprehensively renewed. More than twenty years in the making, Bracknell’s regeneration failed when commercial goals ( transactional values ) dominated. We show how the Council’s place leadership helped establish a diverse set of principle-based values that public and private project team actors subscribed to and which also generated transactional value. Vision-making processes helped harness these values and transform the project from a property (re)development to a regeneration that sought to create a culturally self-confident place. Our paper contributes to theories of (re)development and value by exploring the role value(s) play(s) in making regeneration distinctive.
Reparative planning scholarship emphasizes participatory integration as a key process for addressing state-sanctioned violence. In the case of post-war Bosnia, survivors of wartime sexual violence struggle to voice their reparative demands to planning institutions rebuilding spaces. Through comparative ethnographic analysis and participatory action research in Vi & scaron;egrad, I examine how property control over spaces with histories of violence enables key mechanisms to navigate planning commissions, such as providing the legal standing that transforms survivor claims into institutional access, local ownership of physical transformation processes, and organizational narrative authority. These findings call for extending reparative planning scholarship to center property control in contexts of institutional denial and memorialization.
Doughnut Economics has become an important model for planning, often assumed to offer a better, more sustainable approach. This article engages with such assumptions by critically interrogating the radical potential of doughnut planning. It does this through examining the doughnut diagram, which conceptualizes core ideas of Doughnut Economics, and by relating these to discussions in planning. The analysis draws on Lacanian thought and extends the psychoanalytic approach to include visual representations in planning. It shows that the doughnut diagram forecloses ways of seeing and enjoying that more fundamentally could challenge mainstream planning. Assuming the doughnut diagram is shaping doughnut planning, this leads to the conclusion that this planning model works against more far-reaching ambitions of some of the planners rallying around it.
Adaptive management approaches are attracting attention in spatial and environmental policy. These approaches require planning law that stimulates flexible, participatory, and network-oriented procedures based on scientific input and cyclical processes. In this article, the recently promulgated Dutch Environmental Planning Act is assessed using frameworks of adaptive law and environmental justice. The argument is made that the new Act conforms to many of the characteristics of adaptive law, but facilitates a neoliberal spatial planning regime. The case illustrates how adaptive law can become a facilitator of neoliberal planning practices due to insufficient attention to concerns of justice. Incorporating justice concerns into adaptive law and planning would benefit resilience and increase their transformative potential.
This paper engages with the 'material turn' in planning to interpret the epistemological potential of incorporating design methods into communicative planning. It argues that user-centred design methods can help overcome persistent shortcomings of the communicative approach by opening up more inclusive and action-oriented pathways for collective reasoning, while addressing structural injustices implicit in the assumption of communicative rationality. Using a documentary research method, the paper analyses five school-based planning projects in Seoul, South Korea. After discussing how design-driven deliberations reshaped communicative rationality, it conceptualises 'empathy', 'plurality', and 'procedural justice' as epistemo-ethical capacities that design methods can introduce into communicative practice, and emphasises how their exploratory, iterative, and lateral structures-unlike the serial unfolding typical of argumentation-can foster collective thinking and spatio-temporal rhythms that are conducive to what Habermas sought through his notion of intersubjective understanding.
This article presents the first sustained engagement with DeafSpace within urban planning theory. While DeafSpace-a design framework formally developed at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., in 2005-has influenced architectural design by centering Deaf cultural practices and visual-tactile communication, its broader urban implications remain unexplored in the literature. We reposition DeafSpace as a radical planning imaginary challenging phonocentric norms and technocratic regimes. Drawing predominantly on disability and Crip theory, we theorize DeafSpace as a transgressive praxis grounded in interdependence, care, and spatial agency. We offer a set of provisional recommendations for planners, not as a comprehensive blueprint, but as an opening toward reimagining the normative foundations of planning which DeafSpace unsettles. Finally, we conclude with thoughts on the future of DeafSpace research in urban planning, emphasizing the necessity to attend to the Global South and its growing Deaf community.
In contexts of high transaction costs and unclear property rights, urban planning may benefit from Coasian principles. This paper examines how such principles can clarify actors' responsibilities and foster cooperation in market-oriented planning systems. Using Poland's Housing Act (2018) as a test case, it analyses how negotiated agreements between public and private actors operate outside traditional land-use plans. The study contributes to debates on planning reform by adopting a Coasian institutional perspective, showing how flexible legal frameworks can reallocate development rights. It argues that Coasian approaches may improve planning outcomes where formal regulatory systems are fragmented or weak.
The Just City is a concept of justice that has gained traction in both planning theory and practice. Despite its popularity, the definition of alternative conceptions, the tradeoffs between them, and thinking them through systematically towards policy measures, has received less attention. The goal of this paper is to provide a framework that helps to inform academic and policy discussions about planning for urban justice. In doing so, it draws on political and economic philosophy. Four different ideal types of The Just City, based on four different philosophies, are being identified and compared: The Happy City (utilitarianist), The Equal City (egalitarian), The Supportive City (sufficientarian), and The Free City (liberal). The paper shows that each of these translates into different planning policies. Moreover, although each of them might appear sympathetic and desirable, at least at first glance, they do not all go well together or are even incompatible. Being precise and making choices about what urban (in)justice entails is necessary for effective and legitimate policy-making, especially in the long run.
The Kowloon Walled City (City), as curated to the world in the media, emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as the world's most densely populated and "lawless" neighbourhood, but was demolished in the early 1990s to make way for a public park. It was institutionally unique: de jure once a Chinese exclave in Hong Kong under jurisdictional dispute, but a territory where few of Hong Kong's and none of China's laws or regulations were enforced. What resulted was neither the predicted tragedy of the commons nor the tragedy of the anti-commons, but an unusually permissive arena for bottom-up property boundary readjustment, property development and non-violent market entrepreneurship. The City exhibited an interesting interplay of minimal state intervention and expansive entrepreneurial action based on some state delimitation of property rights. Two case studies of its land assembly demonstrate high-rise densification, using documentary (cadastral, census and archival) information. The densification facilitated the entrepreneurial innovation of unlicensed medical and dental services that made up for colonial Hong Kong's shortages in such services. These and similar outcomes represent a Kirznerian innovation lab on a Coasian property rights foundation.
As a novel contribution to the application of economic concepts of property rights to resource management as a fundamental planning issue, this paper analyses the dichotomy (the Barzel thesis) between "economic property rights" and "legal property rights". In lieu of Barzel's dichotomous distinction, an alternative account of "de facto property rights" as a fraction of "de jure property rights" is presented. The paper uses three case studies on squatting to show the untenability of the Barzel thesis. It offers an application of the thesis as a distinction along two dimensions, namely de jure rights (as legitimate and commonly-accepted rules on access) to and de facto access/control of a resource or property.& mldr;property rights are indispensable constraints for any decision involving more than one individual (Cheung 1978: 42).
Prefigurative mobilizations, such as alternative micro-communities and urban social movements, organize their practice here and now in ways revealing the activists’ aspirations for a future society founded on principles and values quite different from those forming present capitalist society. This means-ends coherence has wide-reaching consequences for the ethics, policymaking and organization of the prefigurative entities. Progressive radical initiatives often combine such coherence with direct democracy, anti-hierarchy, value rationality, direct action, and real-world experimentation leading to revisions of means and ends – that is, some openendedness. These elements characterize the suggested activist planning theory for prefigurative mobilizations, which it is my aim to describe and analyze. The research approach is to focus on the claim for means-ends consistency, which strongly affects what kind of planning is possible, and to contrast the theory outlined here with well-established modes of planning by comparing decision models, experts-locals interaction and forms of democracy. There is a global need for this, as thousands of intentional communities, prefigurative social movements and transition towns are preparing for transformation to a greener, more just and convivial society without a planning-oriented basis of their efforts. The article fills a serious gap, since planning theory has properly analyzed neither prefiguration nor the consequences of ethically founded means-ends consistency.
Attention economics concerns itself with the study of the allocation of attention, conceptualized as a scarce resource. In this essay I relate fundamental insights from attention economics to recent advances in a specific type of artificial intelligence known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAIs GPT. I argue that the development leap known as the ‘LLM revolution’ can be expected to have a fundamental impact on planning practice. However, we should be careful not to stare ourselves blind at the expectation that LLMs will necessarily always deliver superior ‘intelligence’. Rather, it may be more helpful to think of them as providing relatively cheap synthetic competent attention, considering that attention scarcity rather than information/knowledge scarcity is the critical bottleneck within many contexts of contemporary planning practice. The essay attempts to tease out the implications of such a perspective, with a particular focus on what this could mean for the future of the planning profession.
