From an epistemological perspective, this paper explores ethical dilemmas embedded in China’s urban planning practices, especially smart city planning. Urban planning is inherently oriented toward goodness, yet planners frequently face unavoidable trade-offs that may harm the interests of certain individuals or groups during implementation. Therefore, planners ought to abide by ethical principles to minimize such adverse impacts. From an epistemological lens, three factors may generate unintended negative social externalities in planning practice: planners’ insufficient empathy, inherent limitations of planning knowledge, and prevalent planning fallacies—problems particularly pronounced in smart city initiatives. This article argues that planners must cultivate empathy grounded in communicative rationality to identify vulnerable parties and mitigate their losses. Nevertheless, the inherent bounds of planning knowledge render harm-free planning practically unattainable. Complementary safeguard policies are thus required alongside planning formulation and execution to effectively protect disadvantaged or adversely affected groups and operationalize planning ethics. In sum, urban planning demands rationality, sensibility rooted in empathy, communicative rationality, and a supporting framework of safeguard policies.

This paper examines ethical challenges within China’s urban planning practice from an epistemological viewpoint, a set of issues growing increasingly salient amid contemporary smart city research and implementation. Ethics governs interpersonal relationships and the moral norms regulating such interactions. The ethical dynamic between planners and the communities they serve, alongside broader questions of planning justice, have received extensive scholarly attention both domestically and internationally. However, domestic literature rarely addresses ethical quandaries arising from planners’ unavoidable trade-offs in scheme design, nor has it analyzed planning ethics through an epistemological framework. Epistemology, a branch of philosophy, investigates the nature, origins, and scope of human knowledge and the relationship between human cognition and reality. In urban planning, inadequate understanding of diverse groups’ demands may create win-lose outcomes in spatial schemes, raising critical ethical questions. Epistemology enables analysis of how planning knowledge is generated, its reliability, and its inherent constraints, thereby illuminating the ethical risks embedded within planning practice. This paper reaches the following conclusions: urban planning implementation inevitably creates winners and losers among affected populations; planners must apply ethical standards to identify disadvantaged groups and reduce their losses. Yet the limitations of planning knowledge make entirely harm-free planning unachievable in practice. Supplementary safeguard policies must accompany urban planning formulation and delivery to shield vulnerable or harmed populations and realize normative planning ethics.

Two practical imperatives motivate this epistemological inquiry into Chinese urban planning ethics. First, guided by the policy mantra “Cities built by the people, for the people,” the urban planning community actively pursues people-centered planning frameworks, which raise unresolved critical questions: Who constitutes “the people”? How can planners verify genuine comprehension of public demands? Are planning solutions effective, and how to measure such efficacy objectively? How to assess public satisfaction fairly? These questions carry weight because planners intervene in the lives of others. How can one truly grasp another’s lived experience? How confident can planners be in their understanding of public needs? Are conventional social survey methodologies reliable for planning research, and how to address their deficiencies? Planners must confront these questions amid China’s shift to high-quality urban development. Second, ethical tensions intensify with the proliferation of smart city construction. Driven by rapid information technology advancement, smart city development has become a performance benchmark for municipal governments. Academics advance smart city technical systems, planning practitioners implement digital urban frameworks, and private capital races to capture market and technological dominance in smart urban infrastructure. All stakeholders approach smart city innovation with overwhelming optimism, framing digital technology as a definitive, reliable solution to urban social challenges. Yet such optimism necessitates prudent scrutiny: Do smart city technologies deliver universal benefits, or do certain demographic groups incur disproportionate losses? How can planning mitigate harm to vulnerable populations? These pressing ethical practicalities remain understudied, with no formal regulatory safeguards instituted to mitigate adverse social externalities from smart city technology deployment.

Starting with prominent ethical conflicts emerging from smart city planning delivery, this paper first interrogates the core question of whom Chinese planning serves within the domestic institutional context. It then employs epistemology to analyze how rationality, empathy, bounded planning knowledge, and planning fallacies shape planning design and implementation. Finally, it proposes complementary safeguard policies to address existing and prospective ethical risks within smart city initiatives.

Aristotle opens the Nicomachean Ethics with the observation: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good.” By parallel logic, urban planning inherently pursues the good by advancing human welfare. Nevertheless, planners face constant trade-offs: prioritizing efficiency or equity? Allocating limited fiscal resources to talent housing or low-income residential development? Designating road space for public transit or private automobiles? Such choices systematically benefit some groups while disadvantaging others. Is sacrificing minority interests permissible to achieve aggregate societal welfare? These constitute tangible, unresolved ethical planning dilemmas.

Smart cities exemplify such tensions. China’s smart urban development has advanced rapidly, with digital tools delivering widespread societal benefits. [Smart city applications include urban brain platforms for integrated governance, smart grid systems for energy conservation, intelligent water management networks for water efficiency, mobility platforms optimizing travel choices, and commercial smartphone applications delivering personalized services. This ethical analysis focuses on citizen-facing smart city tools.] Yet smart urban technologies also generate stark ethical risks. In practice, digitally marginalized populations cannot keep pace with informational and intelligent innovation, lacking the cognitive or financial capacity to adapt. Elderly residents without smartphones, for instance, face mounting mobility barriers and erosion of basic urban rights due to digitalization. Smart city planning predicated on digital infrastructure thus raises unignorable ethical concerns.

Over the past decade, domestic urban planning scholarship has increasingly debated planning ethics, broadly affirming core normative values centered on public interest, social justice, and ecological stewardship. Some scholars argue ethically sound urban planning must uphold three foundational principles: primacy of the public interest, fairness and justice, and human-centeredness, which serve as evaluative criteria for planning legitimacy, rationality, and effectiveness. Such discourse aligns with the core premise that planning ought to pursue collective good. However, existing literature predominantly elaborates on the meaning of “planning for the good” without thoroughly addressing ethical trade-offs in implementation. A questionnaire survey of planning administrators, academics, designers, and students reveals broad abstract consensus on social justice, yet sharp divergence emerges when evaluating concrete planning scenarios.

The core mandate of urban planning is structuring spatial arrangements to accommodate diverse human activities and land uses. Functional zoning and transportation networks—the foundational components of urban spatial structure—directly shape human behavior, activity patterns, and welfare. As modern urban economies expand and cities grow larger, functional complexity generates sprawling, intricate spatial systems. Spatial structures are engineered to mitigate conflicts amid dense urban populations, yet they simultaneously constrain individual freedoms. Citizens surrender unregulated spatial autonomy to secure mutually beneficial ordered urban environments. Street grids exemplify this trade-off: pedestrians must follow roadways and traffic regulations rather than wandering unconstrained through undeveloped natural terrain.

The dynamic relationship between people and urban spatial structures evolves alongside urban development and income stratification. Pre-industrial settlements featured small scales, limited urban functions, and undeveloped socialized production and services, with built environments imposing minimal constraints on individual autonomy. The industrial and urban age brought large-scale social division of labor, forcing residents to passively adapt to predefined urban spatial layouts, with adaptive capacity increasingly determined by income and purchasing power. The proliferation of private automobiles amplified income-based spatial inequity, as wealth dictated transit mode selection. The information age and smart city paradigm introduced a transformative shift in human-built environment relations: a new intermediary actor—smart city planners and service providers—now mediates and controls citizen engagement with urban space. This raises a concrete ethical question: How can smart city planning deliver equitable services across income brackets, age cohorts, and social identities?

Chinese planning discourse centers on the collective construct of “the people,” distinguishable from individual “persons.” Canadian urban planner Liang Hancai articulates the planning conception of human subjects: “A ‘person’ denotes an identity: an agent seeking spatial contact through settlement. Persons may exist as individuals or collective entities such as households, enterprises, and associations… Planning research must center on human subjects as its foundation and starting point. Without understanding people’s demands and aspirations for spatial contact, human-centered planning becomes unachievable.” Liang further develops the concept of the “typical person”—the majority making homogeneous locational and activity choices—arguing planning must “prioritize typical groups (the majority) without neglecting atypical minorities, even tiny subpopulations. A reasonable, logical framework optimizes outcomes for typical groups while meeting basic needs of atypical groups.” [See Liang Hancai’s Thinking: The Typical Person]

The distinction between typical and atypical populations merits deeper unpacking. Urban groups rarely act in uniform alignment, as individual choices reflect distinct needs and capacities. From a statistical probability perspective, group behavioral patterns approximate normal distribution: the central mean represents typical populations pursuing mainstream activity patterns, while the distribution’s tails capture atypical minorities. Economists analyze mass behavioral consensus, while psychologists examine deviant minority conduct. Planners must attend to both majorities and marginalized subgroups. If planning prioritizes the 90% of residents clustered around the statistical mean, utilitarian logic appears defensible given constrained public resources. Yet what of the excluded 10%? High-income atypical populations possess private resources to offset inadequate public services, while low-income atypical groups face unmet basic needs.

Within diverse, complex urban societies, every planning intervention creates winners and losers. Large-scale urban village renewal, for example, triggers gentrification, displacing low-income migrant tenants to peripheral districts to accommodate high-income residents who could secure stable housing without public intervention. While urban village redevelopment may boost land-use economic efficiency, urban competitiveness, or optimize spatial layout, sacrificing marginalized groups’ immediate welfare for higher-order collective goals raises profound ethical questions. If a plan’s aggregate net benefits can be quantified and transferred to harmed populations via compensatory mechanisms, such trade-offs may be resolved through benefit exchange. Without functional compensatory markets, however, ethical tensions persist. Liang Hancai’s framework—optimizing outcomes for typical groups while securing basic provision for atypical minorities—lacks rigorous formalization yet offers actionable normative guidance aligned with core planning ethics. From a social justice standpoint, urban planning must prioritize the unmet demands of low-income atypical populations. Consistent implementation of this principle would substantially advance ethical planning practice.

This paper advances a more rigorous normative planning ethic: “do no harm to anyone” or “leave no one behind.” [International development institutions including the World Bank apply this standard to development projects in China and other emerging economies. While imperfectly implemented in practice, adherence carries fundamental moral weight.] Realizing this standard in urban planning proves nearly impossible, however. Land use carries inherent exclusivity: occupation by one party precludes access by another, generating unavoidable trade-offs absent equitable benefit exchange markets. Where such market mechanisms are absent, complementary safeguard policies—such as compensation schemes for harmed populations—are required to operationalize this stringent ethical principle. Such policies are essential to fulfilling the policy vision of “Cities built by the people, for the people,” as “the people” encompasses both typical and atypical populations. Without identifying these two groups, measuring their respective gains and losses from planning implementation, and establishing compensatory mechanisms for harmed parties, planners cannot credibly demonstrate people-centered planning delivery.

How can planning and implementation fully operationalize ethical principles? As established above, planners intervene in other people’s lives. Practically, core epistemological questions emerge: How can planners authentically grasp others’ urban lived experiences? How confident can planners be in their understanding of public demands? How to verify the validity of such knowledge? Are standard planning social survey methodologies reliable, and how to mitigate their limitations? What inherent bounds constrain planning knowledge, and what social harms arise from such limitations? Epistemology provides a framework to unpack these ethical planning concerns.

Epistemology constitutes an ancient, intricate philosophical subfield, characterized by rigorous, exhaustive inquiry into human knowledge that may appear overly granular to lay observers. Yet its conceptual frameworks, modes of reasoning, and theories of cognitive formation equip applied planning disciplines to analyze and resolve human-centered challenges with greater professionalism, rigor, and reliability. [Sun Shiwen has deployed epistemology to examine planning legitimacy within domestic scholarship.] Knowledge carries intrinsic value, pursued out of human curiosity, alongside instrumental value as a tool to solve practical problems and achieve defined objectives.

Epistemology establishes that all knowledge is bounded. Even amid unprecedented technological advancement, humanity retains vast uncharted ignorance of global systems. Confucius articulates this core precept: “To know what you know and to acknowledge what you do not know—that is true wisdom.” No body of knowledge within established domains is complete, all contain gaps and flaws. Furthermore, human observation is filtered through preexisting beliefs and value frameworks; identical contexts elicit divergent responses shaped by disparate worldviews and priorities. Temperament also shapes future scenario forecasting, separating optimistic and pessimistic cognitive biases. When bounded, fallible knowledge is deployed to intervene in others’ lives—especially contested questions of human welfare—extreme prudence becomes mandatory.

Planners adopt a problem-oriented, forward-looking stance, deploying specialized planning knowledge to design built environments accommodating human spatial activity. This parallels inventors creating functional new consumer goods, both designing for external parties. Yet critical ethical distinctions separate planners and inventors. In competitive markets, manufactured goods such as smartphones are displayed for voluntary consumer selection, with purchasers exercising agency based on personal preference and purchasing power. In planned cities, residents—especially new migrants—must passively inhabit the built environment unless they relocate entirely. The planner-public relationship thus features inherent information asymmetry and unequal power dynamics. Planners command technical expertise and operate rationally. [Domestic planning scholarship has extensively analyzed planning rationality and rational planning frameworks, which this paper does not reiterate.] Chinese planners additionally represent municipal governments, occupying a structurally dominant position with substantial discretionary authority during implementation. The general public, by contrast, lacks technical expertise, reasoning intuitively through personal lived experience to assess planning impacts, passively adapting to predefined urban spatial layouts. While public participation mechanisms exist throughout planning workflows, citizen choice sets remain constrained, and engagement depth is frequently insufficient. [Western planning theory long identified limitations of rational comprehensive planning, advancing advocacy planning and collaborative planning grounded in Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory.]

Planners must authentically apprehend public demands and lived experiences, a capacity rooted in empathy and compassion. [Empathy and compassion are distinct concepts: empathy does not inherently generate compassion, yet compassion grounded in empathy carries greater normative legitimacy.] Empathy constitutes the emotional foundation of humane planning. Urban planning practice operates predominantly through rational processes of investigation, analysis, and design leveraging technical expertise to meet defined objectives. [Zhang Bing distinguishes technical rationality in plan formulation from institutional rationality in implementation instruments.] Citizen attachments to local places produce place attachment, shaping intuitive, emotional reactions to planning proposals. Planner empathy bridges rational technical analysis and public subjective experience, serving as a medium to capture intuitive public perceptions. Insufficient empathy restricts planners’ cognitive capacity and limits acquisition of experiential public knowledge. Epistemology confirms the intimate interdependence of rational and sensory cognition: rational analysis emerges from sensory observation, while subjective experience validates objective rational conclusions.

Crucially, empathy serves as a prerequisite for compassion. Scottish philosopher David Hume argues compassion represents a natural human sentiment, a foundational principle of human nature and the basis of moral judgment, motivating ethical conduct through internal disposition. Compassion alone enables comprehension of others’ lived experiences and constitutes the sole source of moral sentiment. The normative value of socially beneficial virtues derives from the principle of compassion; only empathy and compassion allow individuals to recognize the worth of collective good, motivating stewardship of public and societal interests. Action springs not from rational deduction, but from emotional disposition. Hume’s affective ethics remain contested after centuries of scholarly debate yet have gained widespread practical acceptance.

Planners and researchers rely on social surveys to map population demographics, demands, and preferences for planning alternatives. Yet all methodologies contain inherent flaws, and universally satisfactory collective social choices are functionally unachievable. Reflecting on British planning practice, eminent urban scholar Peter Hall laments: “The public fragments into disparate groups holding conflicting values, which resist simple categorization; individuals occupy multiple overlapping social identities as household members, laborers, civil society participants, and consumers, whose respective value systems frequently contradict. Public opinion polls and surveys rarely facilitate optimal scheme selection and may mislead practitioners, as most citizens struggle to evaluate abstract long-term objectives disconnected from direct personal experience. Divergent viewpoints render comprehensive compromise schemes delivering universal satisfaction nearly impossible.” Economist Kenneth Arrow mathematically proved the impossibility of a universally preferred collective choice outcome via democratic voting amid heterogeneous individual preferences. This widely accepted theoretical result underpins this paper’s proposal for complementary planning safeguard policies.

Beyond cultivating empathy and compassion, planners must maintain critical awareness of planning knowledge’s inherent limitations. All professional expertise carries constraints, planning knowledge included. Urban planning history records numerous well-intentioned interventions generating unforeseen adverse outcomes due to bounded technical understanding. Epistemologically, such planning failures are unsurprising. Philosopher Karl Popper posits scientific inquiry is inherently fallible; scientists, like all humans, make errors, and no body of scientific knowledge qualifies as absolute, infallible authority.

Urban planning integrates engineering, architecture, geography, economics, sociology, environmental science, public administration, political science, and other disciplines, yet urban problems themselves transcend disciplinary boundaries. Each academic field operates through instrumental rationality, deploying specialized knowledge to achieve predefined goals. Who defines such goals, however? If planners alone set target outcomes, misalignment with public aspirations emerges. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s communicative rationality—consensus-building through linguistically valid communicative interaction—addresses this tension. Additionally, no single planner can master every disciplinary domain, requiring interdisciplinary planning teams. Urban economist William Alonso nevertheless argues multidisciplinary teams suffer uneven expert authority and uneven collaborative capacity, yielding superficial coordination at best. Optimal practice requires lead planners possessing cross-disciplinary literacy and integrated planning experience.

Planning practice also suffers from the pervasive planning fallacy. Overconfident technical planners systematically underestimate risks during implementation, while technically rational planning workflows remain vulnerable to political intervention, generating stark divergence between projected outcomes and realized delivery: excessive construction timelines, inflated costs, severe negative social externalities, and diminished net benefits. Chinese planning practice frequently manifests this fallacy, with limited risk assessment, minimal contingency planning, and failure to model worst-case scenarios.

Planning scholarship may derive new insights from past failures, yet planning interventions impact fundamental human interests, and missteps may generate irreversible losses: ghost towns from premature overdevelopment, wasted agricultural land, or severe hardship for low-income tenants displaced by urban village renewal. In other cases, harmed populations gradually adapt to transformed environments and silently absorb welfare losses. To prevent irreversible harm to marginalized groups, planners must rigorously identify winners and losers across alternative schemes, prioritize incremental, small-scale pilot implementation to mitigate damage through iterative adjustment, and establish complementary safeguard policies as a final loss-mitigation buffer.

Smart city planning constitutes an emerging subfield of urban planning practice. As smart city technology remains in early developmental stages, no consolidated consensus exists defining its scope, core objectives, and deliverables. Current practical applications focus primarily on municipal public services, including integrated smart mobility planning and digital urban disaster risk management. Yet smart city technology carries extensive commercial potential, with private enterprises combining capital and digital tools to expand market share and technological dominance. Smart city planning research expands rapidly, marked by pervasive optimistic bias. Simultaneously, some local governments prioritize short-term political performance metrics over robust industry regulation, centering planning interventions on the statistical majority of typical citizens while neglecting vulnerable subgroups. This dynamic generates substantial ethical risk: smart city technologies deliver broad societal benefits yet restructure daily life and amplify systemic dependence on digital infrastructure. Excessive reliance creates monopolistic, inflexible systems, rendering urban communities structurally fragile. Imagine cascading breakdowns in digital payment platforms disrupting all urban social order. What ethical safeguards can smart city planning implement to mitigate such risks?

Digital technology developers frequently exhibit excessive rational optimism and overconfidence. Big data analytics map population behavioral patterns, identifying causal mechanisms to generate predictive models, under the assumption that all urban activity can be fully governed via information systems. Techno-utopianist scholars even claim digital tools constitute the ultimate solution to urban challenges—a proposition widely contested. Converting cities into AI-governed automated systems fully subordinating human agency raises profound ethical questions unlikely to gain broad public acceptance.

Techno-utopianism overlooks cities as diverse, emotionally rich, creative civic social systems. International scholars critique data-driven urbanism for “reducing urban life to logical computational rules and algorithms through computerized analysis, grounded in instrumental rationality and positivist epistemology.” Domestic critics similarly denounce leading smart city platforms: “Digital footprints generated by pedestrians and consumers on cloud computing platforms are captured via mobile devices, parameterized, then deployed to constrain subsequent individual activity patterns. Mass behavioral norms derived from aggregate urban populations are imposed uniformly on every citizen, forcing individual conduct toward homogenized, conformist mainstream patterns. Users become permanently tethered to big data systems, unwittingly subjected to automated behavioral manipulation. This constitutes the core mechanism and inevitable consequence of data-driven urban governance: enforced conformity, eroded individual agency, and automated behavioral control.” Amid such concerns, international theorists advance the concept of “sufficiently smart cities,” repositioning digital technology as auxiliary tools rather than dominant urban governance frameworks.

Existing smart city applications fail to deliver universal inclusive benefits. Digital marginalized populations cannot keep pace with technological innovation and risk exclusion, while current digitally literate groups may face future displacement as technology advances. Advanced human-machine interfaces may resolve exclusionary gaps in the long term, yet active voluntary agency differs fundamentally from passive enforced adaptation, threatening core human values and individual liberty. All human capacity carries inherent bounds; researching and building social consensus around differentiated digital literacy across population subgroups constitutes an urgent priority. Domestic smart city scholarship has begun addressing associated ethical risks, including research on vulnerable groups’ demand for hybrid online-offline retail spaces. Other scholars warn smart city development risks generating techno-utopian superficial innovation masking structural inequality and injustice, advocating moderate technological deployment to build “sufficiently smart” rather than hyper-digitalized cities.

Beyond digitally excluded populations, smart city practice generates additional ethical risks: privacy violations, manipulated individual choice, ambiguous legal liability for digital system failures, monopolization by information technology conglomerates, and malicious digital harm targeting the public. A review of international smart city literature identifies widespread academic concerns over adverse outcomes: technocratic urban governance, corporate capture of municipal administration, deepened urban social conflict, intensified systemic surveillance, and amplified urban fragility. Smart city planning must actively anticipate and mitigate these public risks and concerns.

Complementary safeguard policy frameworks constitute one viable mitigation mechanism, designed to prevent and alleviate undue harm to citizen interests from planning implementation. Such instruments are standard practice globally for public infrastructure investment targeting socioeconomic development. The World Bank maintains a comprehensive safeguard policy system to mitigate human and ecological harm from its financed construction projects, a model adaptable to urban planning delivery. Planning instruments require rigidity to sustain normative authority, directional guidance, and binding implementation constraints, yet complementary policies enable flexible, equitable operationalization.

This paper proposes the following directional safeguard policy recommendations tailored to smart city planning:

These recommendations remain directional and normative, with detailed feasibility analysis reserved for subsequent research due to space constraints.

Instrumentally rational planning knowledge, like all specialized expertise, carries inherent limitations. Uniquely, however, urban planning reshapes built spatial environments and directly impacts human welfare, and pursuit of aggregate collective good may unavoidably harm minority groups. Expanded empathy, compassion, and rigorous urban empirical research can mitigate the bounds of planning knowledge, yet epistemology confirms perfect, error-free knowledge is unachievable. All planning interventions carry inherent risk of unintended harm stemming from incomplete analysis or cognitive bias, a risk amplified within the nascent smart city planning field. The planning community must continuously advance digital technology research while prioritizing design solutions accommodating digitally vulnerable populations. Decision-makers must establish complementary safeguard policy frameworks grounded in social ethics to protect current and future marginalized digital groups, constrain technological monopolies, and align technological advancement with equitable societal adaptation.

In summary, urban planning constitutes a rational technical instrument built upon extensive urban empirical research. All knowledge remains bounded, planners may generate fallacies due to insufficient empathy or excessive optimism, and majority-oriented planning inherently generates unequal benefit distribution. Fully error-free planning is functionally unachievable. Alternative normative frameworks are therefore required: suspend planning delivery where benefit distribution remains ambiguous, and establish formal compensatory recourse for harmed populations where planning implementation generates inequity. This prudent framework aligns with core planning ethics and advances national policy objectives of shared prosperity and common prosperity amid China’s high-quality urban development transition.

UPI

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