To better disseminate scholars’ research findings, we will irregularly publish condensed highlights of accepted papers that have not yet been formally printed for readers’ reference. This article is an abridged version of the accepted manuscript Exploring Ethical Issues in Urban Planning from an Epistemological Perspective published in Urban Planning International (UPI), with release authorized by the author. Readers are welcome to offer corrections and engage in discussions. We sincerely thank the author for taking time out of a busy schedule to prepare this condensed version, whose efforts greatly improve the reading experience of academic papers.

Ethics concerns interpersonal relationships and the moral norms and criteria governing such relationships. In a diverse and complex urban society, the implementation of any policy or plan inevitably creates winners and losers — ethical dilemmas therefore frequently arise in urban planning practice. Take smart city construction as an example: although technological applications have delivered enormous benefits to urban societies, there remain technologically disadvantaged groups who cannot keep pace with advances in information and intelligent technology, or lack sufficient cognitive or financial capacity to adapt. A typical case is elderly residents who do not own or cannot operate smartphones, whose daily travel has become increasingly inconvenient. How should planners address such ethical dilemmas?

Mr. Liang Hening proposed that urban planning should maximize the interests of the majority while satisfying the basic interests of minorities. A more rigorous ethical principle for planning is to ensure that plan implementation does no harm to any party. Admittedly, this standard is nearly impossible to fully achieve in reality. Urban planning lays out spatial frameworks for various activities and land uses, yet land use is exclusive: occupation by one party excludes opportunities for others, creating inherent trade-offs unless a fair mechanism for benefit exchange is established. Where such a mechanism is absent, urban planning must be paired with supporting safeguard policies (such as compensation schemes for parties harmed by plan implementation) to effectively uphold the above ethical principle. This is essential for fully practicing the tenet that cities are built by the people and for the people, since the concept of "the people" encompasses both the majority and minority groups. If planning fails to identify these two groups and their interest demands, neglects how plan implementation impacts their gains and losses, and lacks compensation measures for harmed parties, it will be difficult for planning and its delivery to truly realize the vision of cities built by and for the people.

Planners adopt a problem-oriented, forward-looking approach, applying professional planning knowledge to shape built environments that satisfy human spatial activity demands. Consequently, planners must recognize the genuine needs and sentiments of "others". Empathy and compassion are required to achieve this, which constitute the source of human warmth in planning. Planning work is largely rational, encompassing investigation, deliberation and formulation, with professional expertise deployed to reach planning objectives. Nevertheless, "others" often hold profound topophilia toward their living and working environments, and their perceptions of emerging challenges and responses to planning are largely emotional. Against this backdrop, planners’ empathy acts not only as a bridge connecting rationality and emotion, but also as a channel to acquire perceptual understanding. A lack of empathy restricts planners’ cognitive capacity and limits their access to grassroots insights. In other words, the rational planning objectives set by practitioners may deviate from the outcomes desired by affected communities. To narrow such misalignment, planners can adopt Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality — reaching consensus with stakeholders through communicative action that satisfies universal validity claims of linguistic expression.

Epistemology demonstrates that all professional knowledge carries inherent limitations, and planning knowledge is no exception. Planners must remain fully aware of the constraints of their disciplinary expertise. Urban planning history abounds with cases where unrecognized limitations of planning knowledge led to well-intentioned interventions that yielded unforeseen adverse outcomes. Planning practice is also prone to the planning fallacy: overconfidence in professional judgment and excessive optimism about the future lead planners to systematically underestimate risks associated with plan delivery. Furthermore, planning processes guided by technical rationality are often subject to diverse political interventions, resulting in stark disparities between anticipated outcomes and actual implementation results. Manifestations include protracted delivery timelines, excessive real costs, severe adverse social impacts, and minimal practical benefits.

Smart city planning, an emerging field of urban planning practice, faces a wide array of risks. Techno-optimists and technology providers tend to be overly rational, optimistic and self-assured, even overlooking the fact that cities are diverse, emotionally rich, creative civic social systems. Practical experience shows that smart city technologies do not deliver universal benefits; segments of society are left behind as technological progress advances, and even groups currently adept at new digital tools risk marginalization in the future. This constitutes an unavoidable challenge for smart city planning. One mitigation strategy is to establish supporting safeguard policy systems to prevent and mitigate undue harm to citizens’ interests stemming from plan implementation. At the strategic level, a prudent, incremental and inclusive development pathway for smart cities should be pursued. As a long-term direction, a transparent, public mechanism for harmed parties to claim compensation can be built on the foundation of equitable urban rights. The rollout of smart city technologies in urban planning should be slowed to preserve public choice over alternative public service modes and grant society sufficient time to adapt to digital innovations. Special attention must be paid to the interests of digitally vulnerable groups, with traditional service channels retained for such populations in the interim. A comprehensive good governance framework for smart cities should be gradually constructed, incorporating mechanisms including public participation, public hearings, technical review committees, advocacy planning, collaborative planning, post-project evaluation, and compensation for harmed stakeholders.

In summary, urban planning regularly presents trade-off dilemmas, and plan implementation may harm the interests of certain population groups. Planners ought to follow established ethical principles to minimize such adverse impacts. From an epistemological perspective, insufficient empathy among planners, inherent limitations of planning knowledge, and the ubiquitous planning fallacy may all generate unintended negative social externalities from plan delivery. Planners should strengthen empathy and cognitive capacity grounded in communicative rationality, identify harmed parties during planning, and strive to avoid inflicting losses upon them. Yet due to the inherent constraints of planning knowledge, a plan that harms no party whatsoever is rarely achievable in practice. Therefore, the formulation and implementation of planning must be supplemented by supporting safeguard policies as a safety net to effectively protect vulnerable or affected groups and fulfill planning ethics. In short, urban planning requires rational analysis, empathetic sensibility and communicative rationality, alongside complementary safeguard policies.

UPIAuthor: Liu Zhi, Research Fellow & Director, Peking University–Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy; Director of China & Asia Programs, Lincoln Institute of Land PolicyEmail: zliu@plc.pku.edu.cn