The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city. The chapters demonstrate how urban technologies shape, and are shaped, by fundamental concepts and principles such as citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. The many authors herein explore how to think of technologically mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of the philosophy of technology. This perspective also contributes to the discussion and process of making cities ‘smart’ and just. This collection appeals to students, researchers, and professionals within the fields of philosophy of technology, urban planning, and engineering.

Planning Theory expresses a sound unease about the direction taken by the current analysis and criticism of planning experiences. To oppose the debate that freezes planning as a permanently declining engagement, this book aims to identify the essential guidelines of a re-launch of planning processes and techniques, configuring a kind of neo-discipline. This builds upon a multi-disciplinary integration - never seen and experimented with until now.

What is this thing called planning? What is its domain? What do planners do? How do they talk? What are the limits and possibilities for planning imposed by power, politics, knowledge, technology, interpretation, ethics, and institutional design? In this comprehensive volume, the foremost voices in planning explore the foundational ideas and issues of the profession.Explorations in Planning Theory is an extended inquiry into the practice of the profession. As such, it is a landmark text that defines the field for today's planners and the next generation. As Seymour J. Mandelbaum notes in the introduction, ""the shared framework of these essays captures a pervasive interest in the behavior, values, character, and experience of professional planners at work.""All of the chapters in this volume are written to address arguments that are important in the community of planning theoreticians and are crafted in the language of that community. While many of the contributors included here differ in their styles, the editors note that students, experienced practitioners, and scholars of city and regional planning will find this work illuminating and helpful in their research.

Physical change and human ecology; What is planning?; Systems; Planning as a conceptual system; On space and spatial planning; Goals; Projecting the system: What is the future?; Models; Some operational models and their underlying theories; Modelling "the whole system"; Evaluation; A spatial method for regional planning; Satisfaction or optimisation? The bounds of rationality; Plan or programme?; A mixed-programming strategy.

For much of the twentieth century improvement in the situation of disadvantaged communities was a focus for urban planning and policy. Yet over the past three decades the ideological triumph of neoliberalism has caused the allocation of spatial, political, economic, and financial resources to favor economic growth at the expense of wider social benefits. Susan Fainstein's concept of the "just city" encourages planners and policymakers to embrace a different approach to urban development. Her objective is to combine progressive city planners' earlier focus on equity and material well-being with considerations of diversity and participation so as to foster a better quality of urban life within the context of a global capitalist political economy. Fainstein applies theoretical concepts about justice developed by contemporary philosophers to the concrete problems faced by urban planners and policymakers and argues that, despite structural obstacles, meaningful reform can be achieved at the local level. In the first half of The Just City, Fainstein draws on the work of John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and others to develop an approach to justice relevant to twenty-first-century cities, one that incorporates three central concepts: diversity, democracy, and equity. In the book's second half, Fainstein tests her ideas through case studies of New York, London, and Amsterdam by evaluating their postwar programs for housing and development in relation to the three norms. She concludes by identifying a set of specific criteria for urban planners and policymakers to consider when developing programs to assure greater justice in both the process of their formulation and their effects.