What is it about?
This textbook offers an accessible overview of a century of planning theory, bringing a critical perspective rooted in contemporary research that will appeal to lecturers and to their students. Organised thematically, with a focus on institutional and justice issues, this book offers a well-grounded alternative to existing traditional overviews of planning theories by situating planning as a governance and regulatory practice. A useful resource for researchers and students, it also offers an innovative framework for addressing current and future issues in urban and regional planning.
Featured Image
Photo by Jürgen Scheeff on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This book is a critical introduction to planning theory. Unlike other books on the same subject, this one is not primarily devoted to presenting and discussing a variegated list of planning theories or composite genealogies of them. Only a single chapter of the book considers a very basic distinction between two main, general ideas of planning. The rest of the chapters focus on issues and problems (e.g. the challenge of complexity, the role of institutions, the place of justice). Specific planning theories are cited only if and when relevant to the main discourse. This approach has been preferred also because the continual involvement with “planning theories” in the plural seems to have led, more or less implicitly, to the adoption of a syncretic perspective in which basic problems have become largely secondary. Needless to say, plurality is always welcome in the theoretical field; however, it must be a productively competing plurality that leads both to the advancement and even to the abandonment of certain perspectives.
Perspectives
The point is neither less planning (as some conservative approaches often a-critically suggest) nor more planning (as some progressive approaches sometimes invoke in a similarly a-critical way), but better planning. In other words, it is not a question of the volume (i.e. quantity) but of the nature (i.e. quality) of public planning intervention.
prof. Stefano Moroni
Politecnico di Milano
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Critical Introduction to Planning Theory, January 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-95-2216-3.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
