The Routledge Companion to Urban Planning

The Routledge Companion to Urban Planning challenges the conventional boundaries of urban planning, urging the field to embrace the complexities and ambiguities of the urban experience. It contends that urban planning must move beyond binary classifications—such as city/country or society/nature—and instead renew itself through language, theory, policy, and practices that engage with mixed forms, overlapping functions, and ethical concerns that lie in the in-between.

Urban planning, as a discipline, is inherently dialectical, simultaneously producing and undermining classifications that shape how we understand, navigate, and transform the world. Yet, within this tension lies a latent spectrum of alternatives. This volume takes this spectrum as its starting point, assembling 32 contributions from scholars and practitioners across the global North and South to critically interrogate and rework the epistemological foundations of planning. Through diverse empirical and theoretical contexts, the chapters explore how mixed forms, overlapping functions, and substantive questions unsettle conventional approaches to governance and intervention. Contributors examine the origins, contestations, and exclusions embedded in urban planning’s classifications, probing their limits and omissions. In doing so, the volume repositions planning as a field that must engage ambiguity, rethink its classificatory logics, and cultivate more adaptive, inclusive, and context-sensitive practices for the worlds between.

This companion will interest scholars and professionals in the areas of Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Governance, Policy Studies, Social Theory, Territorial Management, and Sustainable Development.