How is spatial knowledge produced when the effectiveness of planning interventions cannot be reliably known in advance? This paper addresses this question through the development of Ecoadaptive Intelligence Theory (EIT), a framework theory of spatial knowledge production for a bounded class of urban environmental-planning problems. While planning scholarship has long recognised the significance of complexity, uncertainty, and learning, it has offered limited explanation of the epistemic conditions under which knowledge cannot be fully specified prior to action and must instead emerge through engagement with the system being planned. The paper argues that certain environmental-planning contexts are characterised by three structural properties: causal opacity, contextual contingency, and temporal recursion. Together, these properties generate a structural knowledge deficit, whereby the information required to configure effective interventions cannot be derived solely from predictive modelling, precedent, or expert judgement before implementation. Under such conditions, spatial knowledge is not simply applied but produced through iterative interaction with environmental feedback. From this premise, EIT develops an integrated epistemological framework comprising a set of epistemic principles, an adaptive cycle of intervention and learning, and six falsifiable propositions that specify the theory’s empirical commitments. EIT conceptualises planning not as the application of complete prior knowledge to environmental problems, but as a process through which actionable knowledge emerges through successive cycles of intervention, observation, interpretation, and adjustment. The paper contributes to planning theory by explaining when anticipatory analysis becomes insufficient as a basis for decision-making and why iterative spatial learning becomes necessary. Rather than displacing predictive approaches, EIT situates them within a broader epistemology of environmental adaptation that clarifies the relationship between prediction, experimentation, and learning. The theory is advanced as a bounded but generalisable framework for understanding how spatial knowledge is generated under conditions of environmental complexity and as a foundation for future theoretical refinement and empirical testing.
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.
