Planning Theory

This paper aims to reinscribe an ethics of care in planning through a conceptual framework which connects the ethics of being caring with the politics of practicing care. We argue that planning’s limited attention to care is an unfortunate legacy of positivist views and their alignment with rationalist moral theories in which care is demoted to the private-domestic sphere and ‘feminine’ emotions while justice is elevated to the public-political sphere and ‘masculine’ reason. The perceived universality, objectivity and rationality of justice seems to have eclipsed the particularity, subjectivity and relationality of care. We suggest that a moral vision is needed in planning that integrates care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds.

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.

…property rights are indispensable constraints for any decision involving more than one individual (Cheung 1978: 42).

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.