Introduction

Recently, a relevant official from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development stated that cities at prefecture level and above, as well as county-level cities, will comprehensively carry out urban health check-ups this year, accelerating full coverage of check-ups across four dimensions: housing, residential communities, neighborhoods, and urban areas. According to reports, the urban health check aims for high-quality urban development. By establishing an indicator system and using statistics, big data analysis, and social surveys to collect relevant urban information, identify urgent and difficult issues faced by the public, regularly analyze, evaluate, monitor, and provide feedback on the quality of the urban living environment and the effectiveness of urban planning, construction, and management, it aims to grasp the status of urban construction and development, and promote the modernization of the urban governance system and capacity. In addition, all regions should promote integrated urban health check-ups and urban renewal, adhere to the principle of 'physical examination before renewal' and 'no physical examination does not renew without physical examination', strengthen the connection between the application of urban health checkup results and the implementation system of urban renewal planning, and, in line with key urban renewal tasks, carry out special health checks tailored to local conditions, and improve mechanisms for identifying and solving problems, evaluating outcomes, and consolidating and enhancing the work.

To provide a supplementary perspective for understanding the importance of emotional factors in urban planning, our publication specially recommends Liu Zhi's article "Does Urban Planning Need to Consider Urban Emotional Issues?" " article. The article opens by raising the core question: "Should rational urban planning pay attention to urban emotional factors?" "The authors point out that the current urban health check indicator system is focused on material improvements and service levels, but does not contain any indicators on urban citizens' emotions and happiness, just as regular health checkups lack mental health check-ups." Based on David Hume's philosophy of emotion, the article argues for the relationship between emotion and reason, emphasizing that "urban emotion is an important indicator of urban quality and should not be overlooked in urban planning." Planners need to possess "empathy and sympathy," gaining objective empathy for urban emotions through equal interaction. The author proposes four directions for developing an emotional understanding of planning: "First, how planners can enhance empathy and compassion, paying more attention to the interests and feelings of vulnerable groups in urban society, children, and the elderly, especially reducing the emotional cost of involuntary relocation during urban renewal actions; Second, in spatial planning, create more opportunities and venues for emotional interaction for the general public, reserving space for urban design; Third, more big data sentiment analysis methods should be encouraged in urban planning research and practice, mining people's views, emotions, and emotional expressions about the built-up urban environment from social platform data; Fourth, community responsibility planners should take the lead in exploring how to use rational interaction behavior and sentiment analysis methods to obtain and analyze emotional information, thereby enhancing community emotions through planning. "The article ends by quoting Mr. Jin Jingchang: "Planners and designers must understand the wishes, feelings, psychological states, and behavioral responses of users (residents), meaning they should pay attention to the social and psychological factors of the city." These viewpoints provide a theoretical basis for extending urban health check-ups from material indicators to people's emotional needs.

[Citation Format]

Liu Zhi: "Does Urban Planning Need to Consider Urban Emotional Issues?" [J], Urban Observer, Issue 6, 2024.

(Guangzhou Daily archive photo)

Urban planning should also start from the needs of city residents. Planners and designers need to understand the wishes, feelings, psychological states, and behavioral responses of users (residents), meaning they should pay attention to urban social and psychological factors. — Jin Jingchang, 1987^[1].

Introduction

The central theme explored in this article is: Should rational urban planning pay attention to urban emotional factors? Urban planning is a rational applied discipline, but its research and service subject—the city—is filled with personal and collective emotions. Emotion is a person's psychological response to others, things, events, and their surrounding environment. It can be positive or positive (such as happiness, pleasure, surprise), or negative or negative (such as tension, pain, sadness, fear, anger, annoyance, anxiety). Emotions are very complex and vary from person to person. An individual's emotion that is recognized within a group constitutes group emotion. Overall, emotion is a fundamental element of the city's appearance, closely related to the built environment, economic society, and individual mental state. The urban emotions discussed in this article are limited to the psychological responses and emotional manifestations of city dwellers—those who live, work, and visit cities—to the built environment and planning implementation actions.

Generally speaking, the professional fields shaping the built urban environment can be roughly divided from top to bottom into three levels: urban planning, urban design, and architectural design ^(1). Micro-level architectural design and meso-level urban design both focus on human scale and the emotional impact of the built environment, achieving fruitful results in research and practice ^[2-5].Many architects and urban designers dedicate themselves to creating delightful built environments in their daily work. In contrast, macro-level urban planning rarely uses professional methods to address urban emotional issues. Indeed, planning and design have different divisions of labor; the urban emotional issues encountered at the planning level are not as numerous and direct as those encountered at the design level. There are also other social and political reasons that cause rational planning to neglect urban sentiment, but we know little about them, so this article will not delve into them.

In my view, from the perspective of planning practice in China, some issues related to urban emotions need to be considered and addressed at the planning level. For example, involuntary relocation triggered by urban village renovation can impose emotional costs on long-term tenants. How should urban village renovation decisions account for these costs? How can we reserve enough public space in high-density land use planning? How can we better layout and configure public spaces to enhance accessibility, and enhance the happiness of more seniors with limited resources? Moreover, how can planners truly grasp the urban feelings and emotional experiences of "others" (city dwellers)? These questions form the starting point of this article.

This topic is relatively niche in urban planning research. However, I believe that understanding this will help improve the quality of urban planning. We don't know what we will find when we open the emotional door in front of planning; perhaps the space inside is very small, leaving little room for planning majors; Maybe there's plenty of space. In any case, from the perspective of seeking knowledge, this door is worth opening. This paper first briefly discusses urban scholars' discussions on urban emotions and the neglect of urban emotions by domestic and international planning circles. It then analyzes the relationship between urban people's emotions and their rationality, discusses how planners can empathize with and sympathize with urban residents' emotions, and finally offers several suggestions on how to consider urban emotions in planning.

A city is a concentration of people, and thus filled with a variety of emotions. Emotions manifest at the individual level and blend within various communities and even the entire urban society. "Urban spirit" is actually a general expression of urban emotions. Many great literary works precisely capture and grasp urban emotions, showcasing the charm and allure of the city, portraying the joys and sorrows of city dwellers, and describing the hearts and emotional journeys of different classes, groups, and diverse people. These works not only bring great shock and resonance to readers' hearts but also provide us planning professionals with abundant and vivid material to understand urban emotions.

Urban emotions have also received varying degrees of attention in disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, and geography. German philosopher Georg Simmel analyzed how changes from rural society to urban society, and from small city society to metropolitan society, affect people's psychological states, offering many profound insights into the unique emotional expressions of metropolises ^[6].。 Simmel's student, American urban sociologist Robert E. Parker (Robert Ezra Park) pointed out: "A city is not merely a gathering of buildings, streets, and institutions, but a state of mind—a whole composed of various customs, traditions, and emotions. ”^[7]

Chinese-American geographer Yi-fu Tuan systematically studied the attachment and emotions humans develop toward their familiar living environment, calling all emotional bonds of human attachment to the material environment the "land attachment complex" ^[8].。 He believed that human experience of the environment begins with aesthetics, manifested in the fleeting pleasure and intense pleasure brought by aesthetics; A more enduring and hard-to-express emotion is attachment to a place, because that place is home and a repository of memories, and also a source of livelihood. For the vast majority of people, a good city should be a place full of warmth, harmonious social connections, and a place that people feel attached to.

The author believes that people also develop a "fetish" complex regarding the possessions they own (especially real estate). In urban renewal and public facility construction practices, beyond the reasonable market value of the acquired real estate, there is also an emotional value, which some literature refers to as emotional or psychological cost^[9-10], meaning the negative psychological impact of involuntary relocation on owners or long-term tenants and the unmeasurable personal psychological loss.

Some planning thinkers who have had a huge influence on the development of urban planning thought actually pay attention to urban emotions. For example, Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes wrote in "Cities in Evolution": "Perhaps most importantly, we seek to enter the spirit, the essence of history, and the enduring vitality of our cities." In this way, our designs will express, inspire, and develop their highest potential, thereby more effectively meeting the city's material and basic needs. ^[11] The book's discussion of improving the living conditions of low-income urban groups reflects the author's empathy and sympathy for the living conditions of the poor and women.

The Athens Charter, which profoundly influenced the rationality of modern urban planning, also did not completely ignore human psychological factors: "Economic, social, and political values intertwine with human psychological and physiological attributes, leading to problems in the relationship between individuals and communities." People's lives can only expand when there is a balance between the two opposing forces: individuals and communities. Human psychology and biological characteristics are influenced by the environment...... ^(2).

The field of urban design has extensive research on urban emotions. American urban planner Kevin Lynch is one of the pioneers in bridging the sensibility and rationality of cities. In "City Imagery," he wrote: "A city, no matter how ordinary its scene, can bring people joy." A city is not only something that thousands of people from different social classes and personalities perceive (or enjoy) together, but it is also the result of continuous construction and transformation by many builders for various reasons. ”^[12]

Danish urban public space design master Jan Gehl points out that city dwellers' wandering, watching, listening, conversing, and presenting themselves among all beings are emotional acts to satisfy their emotional needs. He conceives, feels, and implements the city as a whole, proposing humanized distances and scales that closely connect the senses and emotions, seeking public space designs that promote and deepen interaction, providing suitable places to satisfy people's emotional needs. He emphasized: "Understanding human perception, its ways of perception, and the scope of perception is an important prerequisite for planning and designing various forms of outdoor spaces and architectural layouts." ”^[13]

Urban emotions not only reflect people's psychological responses to the built urban environment, but also act as an irrational factor influencing changes in the built environment. American sociologist Walter Firey examined land use changes in Boston's central area under competitive markets in his Harvard doctoral dissertation and found that people's emotions and symbolic meanings associated with the built environment tend to be influenced by proxy economic factors, leading to non-economic and irrational land use changes ^[14].

In summary, we can summarize four points: First, urban emotions are an element that cannot be ignored in cities; Second, urban emotions are related to the built environment and the planning and construction process; Third, urban emotions can be improved and enhanced through planning and design; Fourth, urban sentiment may affect land use.

In contrast, urban planning disciplines themselves lack consideration of urban emotions. Authoritative works on international urban planning rarely discuss urban emotions. For example, American urban planner John Friedmann has outlined the development lineages and intellectual origins of various urban planning theories^[15], and British urban planner Philip Allmendinger has summarized various planning theories^[16].and the reference book for urban planning students: 'Handbook of Planning Research Methods' ^[17]., never discussing urban emotional issues. It can be said that the entire Western urban planning theory community basically does not directly consider the significance and role of emotional factors in planning. Planning rationality generally assumes that human nature is "economic man" (Homo economicus). Various mathematical models based on planning rationality and used for planning research and practice are essentially models about "economic people," with emotions excluded as singular factors from the model. Of course, emotions themselves are elusive and hard to measure, which also limits the tolerance of mathematical models.

Recognizing the limitations of planning rationality, Omandinger deliberately cited the critique of planning rationality by American urban planning historian Leonie Sandercock. Sandcock believed that planning focused too much on narrow technical rationality, neglecting aspects of human nature that were more unconscious. She wrote: "In the postwar rush to transform planning into applied social sciences, many things were lost—the memory, desire, and spirit of the city; The importance of place and the art of placemaking; Local knowledge carved into stone and community memories. …… Social sciences are dominated by an empirical epistemology, which holds that scientific and technological knowledge takes precedence over a range of equally important alternatives—experience, intuition, and indigenous knowledge, based on practices such as conversation, listening, observation, thinking, and sharing; Knowledge expressed through visual, symbolic, ritual, and other artistic forms. ”^[18-19]

In the past decade or so, several studies on urban emotions have emerged in Western planning ^{circles [20-23]}, with American urban planning scholar Howell Baum ⁽³⁾ being particularly prominent. He published a paper titled "Planning with Only Half the Mind: Why Planners Resist Emotion" ^[24].First, it uses examples to illustrate how the emotions and psychological factors of American planners influence decisions and actions during the planning process, as well as the negative psychological impact of urban renewal projects on families forced to relocate. It points out that the premise of planning rationality—that others and urban society are also rational—is incorrect; Planners must understand not only their own emotions but also those of others. Baum attributed the resistance of planned rationality to emotion to the influence of the Western Enlightenment on human thought, emphasizing the value of reason and believing that emotional impulsiveness was immature and irrational. Although disciplines such as sociology, geography, economics, and law increasingly focus on emotional factors in their research and application, urban planning has generally not received much attention. Baum called on the planning community to pay attention to and study the emotional factors in the planning process, and urged planning education to strengthen psychological training. However, Baum did not further explore how rational planning should better understand and consider urban emotions. Encouragingly, research teams both domestically and internationally have attempted to incorporate urban emotional factors into urban planning processes, and some teams use big data analysis methods to study and quantify urban emotions. The following will discuss these encouraging academic advances.

China's urban planning discipline was introduced from the West, and thus is also rooted in rationality. Chinese urban planners generally value and pursue instrumental rationality. Perhaps they have an emotional understanding of urban emotions that keep pace with the times, but rarely express them in words. In the 1980s, Huang Chengyuan and Zhou Zhenming, based on the need for multidisciplinary integration in China's urban planning work, took the lead in comprehensively exploring social psychological issues in cities from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, and management ^[28]. Their achievements may help our planning community better understand urban social psychology, but to this day, they have not been clearly integrated into mainstream urban planning principles through written means. Early lectures on urban planning principles never mentioned that the city was a place of emotional fusion^[29], but in that era of collectivist planned economy that emphasized synchronization, this disregard was understandable. Unfortunately, today's urban planning principles still neglect urban emotions. In 2023, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued the "Guiding Opinions on Comprehensively Carrying Out Urban Health Checkups," proposing the establishment of a basic indicator system for urban health checkups (trial) ^[30].The entire pilot indicator system focuses on material improvements and service levels, but there are no indicators on urban citizens' emotions and happiness, just as regular physical health checkups lack mental health check-ups. Of course, we cannot blame the designers of the urban health check indicator system, because as a new practice, urban health checkups currently lack "urban psychologists."

In fact, China's planning community does not completely ignore urban emotions, but their approaches to enhancing and improving urban emotions are usually indirect, mainly focusing on the practice of livable city construction concepts. The premise is that planning elements such as green spaces, parks, public spaces, and ecological spaces are beneficial to urban emotions and happiness. As long as land use and layout meet the national requirements for these planning elements, the next step is the task of urban and architectural design. This indirect approach combined with rough implementation often results in inefficiency and resource waste. Just look at our new towns and districts, and you'll feel: a thousand city faces, a giant square lacking popularity, wide, monotonous main streets, oppressive main roads, desert-like high-rise office buildings, missing public spaces, children's playgrounds, and sports fields. These newly built material environments generally lack human scale, everyday life, human warmth, and even lack crowds. The creation of the city's physical environment has not effectively transformed into an emotional enhancement. Clearly, these issues are mainly caused at the master plan and regulatory detailed planning level, rather than responsibility at the urban design (i.e., construction detailed planning) and architectural design levels. At the planning level, there was no space or opportunity to maximize the creation of a pleasant emotional experience space for the design side.

One reason the urban planning community generally overlooks urban emotional issues is the lack of conceptual frameworks and quantitative methods that can link urban emotion with urban planning rationality, clearly integrating elusive emotional elements into planning theory and practice. It seems this situation needs to change, because now is an era where "internet natives" are becoming mainstream, expressing themselves and expressing individuality. The expression of urban emotions and feelings—especially through social media—is stronger and more vivid than ever before. Moreover, psychological issues across all age groups in cities are rampant, and the planning community can no longer turn a blind eye. However, the planning community does not know how much of these issues are related to socioeconomic problems, and how much are directly related to the built environment we plan. In the early 20th century, Simmel saw the complexity and tension of metropolitan life, the division and order of large-scale industrial production, which made metropolitan people rational, punctual, calculating, and indifferent. Perhaps it is precisely this emotional trait of metropolitan people that makes rational planning so popular. But times have changed, and urban lifestyles and economic production methods have undergone many qualitative transformations, and the future changes will be even greater. As Wang Jianguo said: "Humanity has entered a brand-new era of individual release and burst of energy, that is, the 'micro-particle society' of the 'omnipresent individual.'" ^[31] Amid the wave of new urbanism, new concepts such as consumer cities, leisure cities, happy cities, and healthy cities have emerged, making urban emotions more diverse and vivid. Negative sentiments regarding the built environment and planning implementation actions also seem to be increasing. Western cities also saw the emergence of anti-rationalism and anti-free market movements driven by popular passion^[32]. For rational planning, it is time to pay attention, explore, understand, and find ways to meet the emotional needs of cities.

What is the intrinsic connection between rational urban planning and urban emotions? This is the issue discussed in this section. Here, we need to further deconstruct its meaning and identify its relationship with reason. Emotion is a manifestation of human sensibility. Sensibility and reason are two opposing yet complementary modes of cognition and action. Sensibility refers to an individual's tendency to make decisions based on emotions, intuition, and experience, and is an instinctive reaction to external things. Rationality refers to an individual's ability to think and make decisions based on analysis, evaluation, and logical reasoning. Sensory cognition comes from the direct sensory perception of external things, while rational cognition arises from the brain's thinking process regarding the essence and laws of things, especially logical thinking. Generally speaking, sensible cognition is the initial stage of cognition, while rational cognition is the advanced stage built upon sensible cognition. Similarly, rational planning is also built on the basis of perceptual understanding. For example, the practice of urban functional zoning originated from the sensory discomfort and low mood caused by industrial pollution, leading to the need to separate industrial and residential functions in spatial planning to mitigate the impact of industrial pollution on living areas. The relationship between emotion and reason is not static; it changes with technological progress and the changing times. For example, many high-tech industries today do not cause environmental pollution. Rational planning must continuously review these changes and make adjustments accordingly to adapt to new developments.

Figure 1 outlines the general process of planners from perceptual cognition to rational planning. First, the built environment brings psychological responses and emotional expressions to city dwellers, which are fed back into the planner's mind through observation or empathy. Here, planners must possess a certain level of empathy and compassion to accurately understand and grasp the emotions of urban residents (or others) (I will discuss this in the next section). Moreover, planners view the operation of the built-up urban environment with a rational perspective and make new plans based on a combination of perceptual and rational understanding. After the implementation of new plans, they bring new psychological responses and emotional expressions to city residents. This cycle repeats, with planners continuously improving the quality of planning to meet the needs of city residents. Compared to rational planning that completely ignores emotional factors, this should be a relatively ideal way of thinking.

There is no clear and straightforward boundary between emotion and reason. In modern urban society, city dwellers are both emotionally rich and possess a certain degree of rational action. How can we understand this intricate relationship? It seems we need a conceptual system for studying urban emotion, so that we can understand it more accurately and clearly. Urban planning is a comprehensive applied discipline, and we can draw inspiration from related disciplines. Philosophy, psychology, and sociology all have specialized studies on emotions. The author believes that the theory of emotional philosophy by British philosopher David Hume can provide us with a way to explore the role of urban emotion in planning [33], because Hume's theory links emotion, morality, and public interest, providing a usable theoretical foundation for urban planning aimed at public interest to address urban emotional issues.

Hume's 'On the Nature of Man' is based on experience, studying human nature and constructing a conceptual system about the human mind. This system also reveals the relationship between emotion and reason. Hume referred to all aspects of human mental activity as perception, dividing perception into two categories: impression and idea. Impressions are vivid and intense experiences possessed by humans, which can be divided into two types: one is feeling, which is the human perception of color, smell, taste, pleasure, and pain; The second is reflection, which refers to passion or emotion. Concepts are thoughts, not emotions; they are copies of human mental states or impressions that are less realistic and vivid; The relationship between ideas is derived from reason, which provides people with factual belief. For example, when we enter an area with severe air pollution, we first feel uncomfortable (feeling), then feelings of depression or even anger (reflection). Over time, this leads to the idea that air pollution causes anger, and rationality mixes this idea with other ideas (such as the picture). DistrictThe production process in the factory produces exhaust gases) and is related. Therefore, understanding the relationship between rationality and emotion is crucial for planners to grasp the feelings and feelings of urban dwellers. As a pioneer of empiricist philosophy, Hume famously said: "The most vivid thoughts are still not as good as the dull feelings." "Hume's theory effectively connects human feelings, emotions, ideas, and reason in the activities of the human mind. If we agree with Hume, rational planning must pay attention to urban emotions and continuously examine the satisfaction and changes of urban emotions.

Hume further pointed out that emotion comes from feeling, and feeling is a necessary condition for action. The purpose of behavior is driven by desire, passion, emotion, and hobby. People always seek pleasure and avoid suffering based on feeling, pursuing what they like and avoiding things that make them unhappy. All actions are motivated by emotion; reason cannot be the motive for action alone, nor can belief be the motivation for action. Emotion determines motivation and the purpose of action, while reason is the means to achieve that goal. Behavior in human society involves morality, meaning whether the purpose of behavior is good or evil. Emotion is the basis for moral distinctions, because the value of purpose comes from emotion, from our emotional responses to certain behaviors and actors, not from reason. Morality can only influence behavior when it acts on emotions. From this perspective, urban emotion is not only an indicator of urban planning and design effectiveness but also an important basis for setting planning goals. Faced with a city rich in emotion, if rational planning simply follows the script without considering urban sentiment, it is essentially the application of dogma and a planning practice lacking warmth.

In recent years, I have continuously observed some urban villages in cities in the Pearl River Delta and found that most new residents living in these villages live and work in peace and contentment, with well-managed communities, clean streets, and well-organized garbage disposal. The construction quality is also very good, with no signs of dilapidation. This is simply because urban villages are located on rural homestead land, with spacing between buildings and street widths not meeting urban standards, posing safety risks such as fire safety and aerial throwing objects. However, these issues can be solved through minor engineering modifications without the need for large-scale demolition or reconstruction. Some urban villages have thousands of new residents living there, hundreds of small shops, at least thousands of jobs, and the bustling daily life of life. However, some cities need to transform these stable, lively, and fulfilling basic urban community communities into high-end residential areas or other non-basic functional zones. Clearly, such planning schemes basically ignore the lives, employment, and emotions of thousands of new urban residents. If planners have some sympathy for urban village residents, understand their anxiety about being squeezed out of living and employment spaces, comprehend the difficulties and feelings of depression and helplessness caused by forced relocation, they might consider how to renew and protect these urban villages. It is evident that varying levels of emphasis on the emotions and emotional costs of urban village residents will lead to very different planning values, goals, and solutions.

Going further than Hume's thought, German sociologist Max Weber divided reason into value rationality and instrumental rationality. The former decides what should be done, while the latter decides how to accomplish ^it[34].。 Value rationality depends on a person's value orientation, morality, beliefs, and aesthetics, and is related to emotional satisfaction. Instrumental rationality is the tool or knowledge used to achieve a specific goal generated by value rationality. Weber built a bridge between the sensibility and rationality of social action by introducing the concept of value rationality. This is enlightening for urban planning that combines sensibility and rationality.

With a conceptual framework for studying emotions, we also face a methodological challenge: how to understand and grasp the elusive and hard-to-measure urban emotions. Traditional social survey methods are often costly, difficult to organize, have low data reliability, and are not commonly used. Encouragingly, the information age has brought a vast amount of emotion data that can be mined, quantified, and analyzed. With the rise of self-media, more and more people are willing to actively post their views on various things and events in the city on social media, including a large number of words that express or imply positive or negative emotions. The "sentiment analysis" method emerged, providing us with a tool with broad application prospects. Sentiment analysis analyzes the opinions, emotional evaluations, attitudes, and emotions people express about entities and their attributes from automatically generated and posted texts on social media ^platforms[35]. By mining and analyzing this data, we can uncover emotional knowledge related to the built environment.

In recent years, foreign research teams have used sentiment analysis methods to study the emotional information expressed by Twitter users evaluating urban public green spaces and large-scale urban sports events in response to urban planning needs ^[36-37]. Other teams have studied how urban planning processes in the digital information era consider urban emotional factors ^[38-39].。 We can use AI machine learning methods to identify various groups in videos showing genuine feelings inadvertently within a specific built environment. Domestic teams have also begun studying emotional elements in urban planning, such as Chen Yitong ^{and others[40].}

When Hume discusses the relationship between emotion and reason, he does not specifically specify whose emotion or reason it is. In urban planning, we mainly deal with the emotions of "others" and the rationality of planners. "Others" generally refers to individuals and groups. Compared to professional planners trained in rational training, the emotions of "others" are more diverse and complex. There has been extensive research on urban citizens' emotional responses to built environments in fields such as urban sociology, urban psychology, urban design, and architectural design. This section will not elaborate here, focusing solely on how planners feel, understand, and comprehend the emotions of "others."

The planner's job is essentially to use planning knowledge to create or improve a built environment to meet the needs of others. In a planned city, others (especially new citizens) generally have to passively accept the existing built environment unless they leave the city. Yi-Fu Duan also said: "A city is an environment arranged by others to meet your daily needs; you have no choice." "^[41] Thus, the relationship between planners and others (or the public) is unique: one is an active service provider, the other a passive service recipient. There is an information asymmetry and unequal status between the two. Planners master professional technical knowledge and tend to act rationally. China's planning departments are part of the government and hold a certain degree of initiative in the implementation of plans. Others, on the other hand, are non-professional and relatively emotional, tending to judge the impact of a plan on themselves based on personal cognition, feelings, and life experience, and often passively accept and adapt to the given built environment. Urban planning is a highly specialized yet highly public topic. Although there are statutory mechanisms for public participation in the planning process, in practice public participation is often insufficient, options are limited, and participation may even become mere formalistic or 'extreme' irrational participation.

Planners need to understand the true needs and feelings of others, which requires empathy and empathy. There is empathy between people; it is a person's deep perception of another mind, consciousness, or spiritual experience in the first person, relative to "others." Empathy is the prerequisite for developing compassion ^[42]. Hume believed that compassion is a natural human emotion and the basis for moral judgment, and it can trigger moral behavior from human motivation; Compassion is not only the only source for understanding others' feelings, but also the sole source of moral emotions, and the foundation of social moral values; Only compassion can make us care about the public and social interests ^[43].

The rational planning process includes steps such as investigation, reflection, and planning, where planners apply professional knowledge to achieve preset planning goals. But the target of the plan—others—may not necessarily identify with or accept the plan's goals. A kind of 'land attachment' forms between others and their own living and working environments, often emotionally affecting the problems they face and their responses to planning. A planner's empathy is the prerequisite for understanding others' emotions, serving as a bridge connecting reason and emotion. Therefore, the planner's empathy and empathy are crucial for setting planning goals and ensuring the success of planning. A lack of empathy limits planners' cognitive abilities and knowledge acquisition. The planner's rational understanding and perceptual understanding should be closely related and complementary. Rational understanding is built on sensible cognition, and further perceptual cognition often verifies the rationality of rational cognition.

Chinese urban planning textbooks all emphasize a people-oriented approach, but in practice, they lack understanding and grasp of the emotions of urban residents. What environmental factors support the construction of cities full of warmth and warmth? How can we reserve enough space at the urban spatial planning level and create these elements in a way that is spatially equitable? How can we reserve a place for urban and architectural design? The configuration, scale, and distribution of planning elements directly related to urban emotions (such as public spaces, parks, green spaces, plazas, commercial streets, children's playgrounds, and other public facilities) all need to be considered at the planning level and implemented on planning plans. The spatial planning process requires comparison and selection of solutions. For example, under the same public green space quota, should one build a large park or a batch of widely distributed and easily accessible small parks? Should green spaces be placed in the green median zones of main traffic arteries that people cannot use, or distributed within or beside residential communities? Should industrial parks for production purposes be planned and built like gardens? In fact, these are not common dilemmas in planning practice, but rather about value orientation and who the plan serves. Perhaps in a reality where profit is universally pursued and grand visions are pursued, some obvious problems cannot be resolved during planning, but failing to consider these issues is a matter of the planner's values, and value orientation depends on the planner's empathy and sympathy for their service recipients.

How can planners effectively gain empathy and reach consensus with the communities they serve? Both Western and domestic planning communities tend to apply the communicative behavior theory of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas ^[44].Collaborative planning is developed on this foundation. Rational communication is not ordinary casual interaction, but is based on the premise of equality, mutual understanding, and non-coercion. The language structure of such interaction should effectively reflect this premise to reach consensus. Simply put, all parties can only genuinely express their personal views and feelings when they understand the topics being discussed and are free from constraints. Some Chinese cities are currently implementing the approach of community responsibility ^{planners [45].} The author believes that the approach of community responsibility planners provides a practical platform for planners to achieve rational interactions and gain community empathy.

The central essence of this article is that urban sentiment is an important indicator for measuring city quality and should not be overlooked in urban planning. Planners must gain more objective empathy for urban emotions through equal communication with their clients, so they can formulate fair planning goals and effectively achieve them through rational planning methods. Urban emotions are an element of the city. In the information age where urban emotional expression is increasingly active and strong, rational urban planning can no longer overlook emotional factors. This paper first argues for the necessity of emphasizing emotion in planning, and, based on the theory of emotional philosophy, suggests that urban planning disciplines build a conceptual framework for studying the relationship between planning and emotion, in order to cultivate the ability to perceptually understand planning. It should be noted that effectively integrating urban emotional factors into urban spatial planning and transforming research findings from urban sociology and psychology on urban emotions into urban planning practice will require long-term effort. This article only points out one possibility.

In research and practice, the perception of planning sensibility should be expanded from four aspects: first, how planners can enhance empathy and compassion, paying more attention to the interests and feelings of vulnerable groups in urban society, children, and the elderly, especially reducing the emotional cost of involuntary relocation in urban renewal actions; Second, in spatial planning, create more opportunities and venues for emotional interaction for the general public, reserving space for urban design; Third, more big data sentiment analysis methods should be encouraged in urban planning research and practice, mining people's views, emotions, and emotional expressions about the built-up urban environment from social platform data; Fourth, community responsibility planners should take the lead in exploring how to use rational interaction behavior and sentiment analysis methods to obtain and analyze emotional information, thereby enhancing community emotions through planning.

In summary, when faced with complex urban emotions and the public's emotional demands for high-quality urban living, planners must have a calm mind, enthusiasm, and empathy. Rational planning without enthusiasm is planning without warmth, and enthusiasm without a calm mind can also lead to planning errors. Over the past decades, the main task of urban planning in China has been to create the physical spatial environment of the city. In the future, during high-quality development, a major task of urban planning is to meet the well-being and emotional needs of urban residents through spatial planning. To achieve this, it is first necessary to put into practice the expectations put forward by Mr. Jin Jingchang: "Planners and designers must understand the wishes, feelings, psychological states, and behavioral responses of users (residents), meaning they should pay attention to the social and psychological factors of the city." ”