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.

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.

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.

This paper introduces a framework of critical institutional hybridity as a theoretical lens for understanding urban planning in postcolonial contexts, where statutory and customary governance systems actively compete, overlap, and reshape urban landscapes. While mainstream planning typically seeks to harmonize these tensions, I argue that hybridity is not a dysfunction to be resolved but a structural condition planners must directly engage. Drawing insights from agonistic planning theory, I analyze the failed Kwabenya landfill project in Ghana to demonstrate how contestation, boundary negotiation, and institutional maneuvering fundamentally reshape planning outcomes. Instead of eliminating these hybrid dynamics, planners should focus on institutional designs that explicitly structure its contestation, thereby enhancing public accountability and enabling more adaptive governance.

The urgency of the current polycrisis calls for a renewal of planning theory. We propose sufficiency planning as an approach, within earth system boundaries as its fundamental premiss to embrace the ecological, interpersonal, social, and individual realms of planning. The reframing of planning through sufficiency normativity builds on an ontological exploration informed by critical realism’s concept of four-planar social being. This approach explicates a philosophical interpretation of planning as a social act that interrelates with nature, social interactions, social structures and inter-subjectivity. In this paper, we lay out the main principles of sufficiency planning, its relevance to existing planning theories, and implications for planning practices.

Critically oriented planning theories aim for emancipation and systemic change. This paper explores the challenges of communicative and agonistic approaches in achieving this goal, arguing that difficulties arise when these theories are applied at inappropriate operational levels. By examining these approaches in terms of opening and closing political space – crucial for initiating and securing systemic change – it highlights the risks of overemphasizing disagreement and opening-up, which can hinder reflexive decision-making in planning and ultimately systemic change. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s hegemony theory and Laclau’s populism theory, the paper proposes a framework that balances opening and closing by fostering a unity and collective will that facilitates decision-making while pursuing systemic change. This unity, while necessary, is ultimately illusory in nature; a tool for temporarily stabilizing new hegemonic orders when navigating the field of planning marked by difference and disagreement.