To promptly disseminate outstanding academic research by scholars, this journal will periodically publish unreleased papers for readers’ reference. Should Urban Planning Take Urban Emotions Into Account has been accepted for Issue 6, 2024, and is released in advance. All readers are welcome to leave comments for corrections and discussions.

This paper centers on a core research question: Should rational urban planning address urban emotional factors? Urban planning is a rational applied discipline, yet its research and service object — the city — is saturated with individual and collective emotions. Emotion refers to people’s psychological reactions toward other people, matters, events and surrounding environments. Emotions can be positive and pleasant (such as joy, delight, surprise) or negative and distressing (such as tension, pain, sorrow, fear, anger, boredom, anxiety). Emotions are highly complex and vary from person to person. Individual emotions recognized within a group form collective emotions. Overall, emotion constitutes a fundamental element of urban manifestations, closely intertwined with built environments, socio-economic conditions and individuals’ inner mental states. The urban emotions discussed in this paper are confined to the psychological responses and emotional expressions of urban dwellers — people who live, work and visit cities — toward built environments and planning implementation activities.

Generally speaking, professional fields shaping urban built environments can be roughly divided into three tiers from top to bottom: urban planning, urban design and architectural design①. Micro-scale architectural design and meso-scale urban design both attach importance to human scale and the emotional impacts of built environments, yielding abundant research and practical achievements[2-5]. Many architects and urban designers dedicate their daily work to crafting agreeable built environments. In contrast, macro-level urban planning rarely adopts specialized methods to examine urban emotional issues. Admittedly, planning and design have distinct divisions of labor, and urban emotional dilemmas encountered at the planning tier are less numerous and direct than those at the design tier. Other social and political factors also cause rational planning to overlook urban emotions, which this paper will not delve into due to limited research scope.

Based on China’s planning practice, this paper argues that certain emotion-related urban issues require deliberation and resolution at the planning level. For instance, involuntary relocation triggered by urban village renewal imposes emotional costs on long-term tenants; how should urban village renewal decisions weigh such costs? How can we reserve sufficient public space within high-density land use planning? How can public spaces be better distributed and allocated to boost accessibility and improve the well-being of more elderly residents with limited resources? Furthermore, how can planners authentically capture the urban feelings and emotional experiences of “others” (city dwellers)? These questions form the starting point of this paper.

This topic remains a niche field within urban planning research, yet the author believes deeper understanding of it will elevate the quality of urban planning. We cannot predict what insights will emerge once we open the emotional dimension in planning practice — the space for emotional consideration may be narrow with limited practical value for planning, or it may prove expansive. Regardless, the pursuit of knowledge compels us to explore this dimension. This paper first reviews scholarly discourse on urban emotions and the neglect of emotional factors in planning academia at home and abroad. It then analyzes the interplay between urban dwellers’ emotions and their rationality, discusses how planners cultivate empathy and compassion toward urban residents’ feelings, and finally proposes actionable suggestions for integrating urban emotions into planning practice.

Cities are agglomerations of human populations, inherently teeming with diverse emotions. Emotions manifest individually, intermingle within various communities, and even permeate entire urban societies. The so-called “urban spirit” is essentially an aggregate expression of urban emotions. Numerous great literary works precisely capture urban emotions, showcasing cities’ emotional allure and temptation, depicting urban dwellers’ joys and sorrows, and narrating the inner emotional journeys of people from all social strata. These works resonate profoundly with readers and provide planners with vivid materials for understanding urban emotions.

Urban emotions have received varying degrees of attention across philosophy, sociology, psychology, geography and other disciplines. German philosopher Georg Simmel analyzed how shifts from rural to urban, and small-city to metropolis societies reshape human mental states, offering profound insights into the unique emotional characteristics of large cities[6]. Simmel’s student, American urban sociologist Robert Ezra Park, stated: “The city is not merely a collection of buildings, streets and institutions, but a state of mind, a complex formed by customs, traditions and emotions.”[7]

Chinese-American geographer Yi-fu Tuan systematically studied human attachment and affection toward familiar living environments, coining the term “topophilia” to describe all emotional bonds between humans and physical settings[8]. He argued that human environmental experience begins with aesthetics, manifested in fleeting delight and intense pleasure derived from beauty; far more enduring and ineffable emotions stem from attachment to a place, which serves as a home, repository of memories and source of livelihood. For most people, an ideal city should be humane, with harmonious collective emotions and a strong sense of place attachment.

This paper puts forward the concept of “objectophilia”: people develop emotional attachments to their possessions, especially real estate. During urban renewal and public infrastructure construction, expropriated properties carry emotional value beyond reasonable market prices, referred to in literature as emotional or psychological costs[9-10] — the negative psychological impacts and intangible spiritual losses incurred by homeowners or long-term tenants facing involuntary relocation.

Several foundational planning thinkers who shaped modern urban planning ideology also paid heed to urban emotions. Scottish planner Patrick Geddes wrote in Cities in Evolution: “Perhaps most importantly, we seek to grasp the spirit, historical essence and enduring vitality of our cities. In this way, our designs will express, stimulate and develop their highest potential, thereby more effectively satisfying the material and basic needs of urban residents.”[11] His discussion on improving housing conditions for low-income urban groups reflects empathy and compassion for impoverished residents and women.

The Charter of Athens, a landmark document shaping rational modern urban planning, does not entirely disregard human psychological factors: “Economic, social and political values intertwine with human psychological and physiological attributes, generating tensions between individuals and communities. Human life can only flourish when balance is struck between these two opposing forces. Human psychology and biology are shaped by environmental conditions…”②

Extensive research on urban emotions exists within urban design scholarship. American urban planner and designer Kevin Lynch pioneered efforts to bridge urban sensibility and rationality. In The Image of the City, he wrote: “However ordinary a city’s scenery may be, it can bring joy to people. A city is not only something perceived (or enjoyed) collectively by thousands of people from diverse classes and personalities, but also a product of continuous construction and reconstruction by countless builders for manifold reasons.”[12]

Danish master of urban public space design Jan Gehl argued that strolling, watching, listening, conversing and self-displaying amid crowds are sensory behaviors driven by emotional demands. He conceived, perceived and delivered cities as holistic systems, proposing human-centered distances and scales closely tied to sensation and emotion, and designing public spaces that facilitate and deepen interpersonal interaction to provide suitable venues fulfilling sensory needs. He emphasized: “Understanding human perception, its modes and scope constitutes an essential prerequisite for planning and designing all forms of outdoor space and building layouts.”[13]

Urban emotions not only reflect people’s psychological responses to built environments, but also operate as an irrational force reshaping urban spatial form. In his Harvard doctoral dissertation, American sociologist Walter Firey examined land use transformations in central Boston under competitive market conditions, discovering that emotional attachments and symbolic meanings assigned to built environments can override rational economic logic, triggering non-economic, irrational shifts in land use patterns[14].

In summary, four core conclusions emerge:

By contrast, urban planning as a discipline insufficiently addresses urban emotions. Authoritative international planning texts rarely discuss emotional dimensions. For example, John Friedmann’s comprehensive genealogy of urban planning theories and ideological origins[15], Philip Allmendinger’s overview of planning theories[16], and the student handbook Handbook of Planning Research Methods[17] all omit urban emotion. Broadly speaking, Western planning theory rarely directly considers the significance and function of emotion in planning practice. Planning rationality generally assumes human beings act as Homo economicus (economic man). All mathematical models developed for planning research and practice based on instrumental rationality are predicated on the economic man framework, with emotion treated as an outlier variable excluded from calculations. Naturally, emotions’ intangible, hard-to-measure nature further limits their integration into quantitative models.

Recognizing the limitations of planning rationality, Allmendinger cites critiques by urban planning historian Leonie Sandercock. Sandercock argues planning overemphasizes narrow technical rationality while neglecting unconscious dimensions of human nature: “In the post-war rush to transform planning into an applied social science, much was lost — urban memory, desire, spirit; the significance of place and the art of place-making; indigenous knowledge inscribed in stone and community memory… Social science became dominated by a positivist epistemology that prioritizes scientific and technical knowledge over equally valid alternative modes of knowing: experiential, intuitive and indigenous knowledge; knowledge derived from dialogue, listening, observation, reflection and sharing; knowledge expressed through visual, symbolic, ritual and other artistic forms.”[18-19]

Over the past decade, a small body of Western planning literature has examined urban emotions[20-23], most notably the work of American planning scholar Howell Baum③. His paper Planning With Half a Mind: Why Planners Resist Emotion[24] first uses case studies to demonstrate how planners’ personal moods and psychological states shape decision-making and action during planning workflows, alongside the adverse psychological impacts of urban renewal on displaced households. He refutes the core assumption of planning rationality — that other people and urban societies operate rationally — arguing planners must comprehend both their own emotions and those of the public. Baum attributes planning’s aversion to emotion to Enlightenment thought, which valorizes rationality and dismisses emotionality as immature and irrational. Despite growing attention to emotional factors in sociology, geography, economics and law, urban planning as a field has largely ignored this dimension. Baum calls for expanded research on emotion in planning processes and enhanced psychological training within planning education. However, he does not elaborate on how rational planning can better recognize and incorporate urban emotions. Encouragingly, domestic and international research teams have begun integrating urban emotional variables into planning workflows, while big data analytical methods are deployed to quantify urban sentiment, a promising academic advancement discussed in subsequent sections.

Urban planning in China was imported from Western systems, thus rooted in rationalist foundations, with Chinese planners generally prioritizing instrumental rationality. While planners may hold intuitive, evolving perceptions of urban emotions, such insights are rarely documented in formal scholarship. In the 1980s, Huang Chengyuan and Zhou Zhenming pioneered comprehensive research on urban social psychology drawing from sociology, psychology and management studies to support interdisciplinary Chinese planning practice[28]. Their work advances planning scholars’ understanding of urban social psychology yet has never been formally integrated into mainstream urban planning theory. Early foundational planning textbooks entirely ignored cities as spaces of emotional exchange[29], an oversight understandable amid the collectivist, uniform planning ethos of the planned economy era. Regrettably, contemporary core planning textbooks still disregard urban emotions. The 2023 Guiding Opinions on Comprehensively Launching Urban Physical Examination Work issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development established a trial basic indicator system for urban health assessments[30], composed entirely of metrics measuring physical upgrades and service levels, with no indicators tracking urban residents’ emotions or well-being — analogous to a human medical checkup omitting mental health screening. This oversight cannot be blamed on the indicator system’s designers, as urban physical examination remains an emerging practice lacking professional “urban psychological practitioners.”

China’s planning community does not entirely ignore urban emotions, yet interventions to improve emotional well-being remain indirect, centered on livable city frameworks. The underlying assumption holds that planning elements such as green spaces, parks, public squares and ecological land positively shape urban sentiment and happiness; once land use quotas mandated by national standards are fulfilled, further refinement falls to urban and architectural design. Such indirect, crudely implemented approaches often prove inefficient and resource-wasting, as evident in newly built towns and districts: monotonous identical cityscapes, underused oversized plazas, wide monotonous superblocks, oppressive arterial roads, isolated high-rise office towers, and shortages of public open space, children’s playgrounds and sports fields. These newly constructed physical environments uniformly lack human scale, street vitality and human warmth, often suffering from sparse foot traffic. Built environment upgrades fail to translate into improved urban emotional well-being, a flaw originating primarily at the master plan and regulatory detailed planning tiers, rather than urban design (construction detailed planning) or architectural design. Planning-level schemes fail to maximize spatial opportunities for designers to craft emotionally fulfilling public spaces.

One key reason for planning’s widespread neglect of urban emotion is the absence of coherent conceptual frameworks and quantifiable tools linking urban sentiment to planning rationality, preventing clear integration of intangible emotional variables into planning theory and practice. This paradigm must shift amid an era dominated by digital natives, defined by self-expression and individualism. Urban emotions and moods — amplified via social media platforms — are more intense and visible than at any prior historical moment, while psychological distress across all age groups in cities continues to rise, demanding planners’ attention. Yet the planning community cannot fully distinguish which of these issues stem from socio-economic conditions versus poorly designed built environments. At the turn of the 20th century, Simmel observed that metropolitan complexity, industrial division of labor and standardized order rendered urban residents rational, punctual, calculating and emotionally detached — a temperament that enabled the prevalence of rational planning. Times have since transformed, with profound shifts in urban lifestyles and economic production modes, and further radical changes forthcoming. As Wang Jianguo notes: “Humanity has entered a new era of individual emancipation and unleashed energy — a ‘granular society’ defined by ubiquitous individual agency.”[31] Waves of New Urbanism have spurred emerging frameworks: consumption cities, leisure cities, happy cities, healthy cities, diversifying urban emotional landscapes, alongside growing public negative sentiment toward built environments and planning interventions. Western cities have also witnessed grassroots anti-rationalist and anti-free-market movements driven by mass public emotion[32]. The time has arrived for rational planning to examine, understand and accommodate urban emotional demands.

What intrinsic connections bind rational urban planning and urban emotions? This section unpacks their interrelationship through conceptual deconstruction. Emotion constitutes a form of human sensibility. Sensibility and rationality represent two opposing yet complementary modes of cognition and action. Sensibility refers to the tendency to make decisions based on emotion, intuition and lived experience, an instinctive response to external stimuli. Rationality denotes the capacity to analyze, evaluate and logically deduce to form judgments and action plans. Sensory cognition arises from direct perceptual experience of external phenomena, while rational cognition emerges from reflective, logical analysis of essential characteristics and underlying laws. Generally, sensory cognition forms the preliminary stage of understanding, with rational cognition built upon its foundations. Rational planning similarly originates from sensory perception. For example, functional zoning emerged as industrial pollution triggered sensory discomfort and emotional distress, prompting spatial separation of industrial and residential land to mitigate adverse residential impacts. The interplay between sensibility and rationality evolves alongside technological and societal change; many modern high-tech industries generate no environmental pollution, requiring rational planning to continuously re-evaluate and adjust spatial strategies to reflect new realities.

Figure 1 outlines the general workflow from planners’ sensory perception to rational planning. First, built environments trigger psychological and emotional responses among urban residents, which feed back to planners via direct observation or empathetic identification. Planners must possess empathy and compassion to accurately grasp urban dwellers’ emotions (elaborated in the subsequent section). Planners simultaneously analyze urban built environment operations through a rational lens, formulating new plans integrating both sensory and rational understanding. Post-implementation, new planning schemes generate fresh psychological and emotional reactions among residents, creating a cyclical feedback loop through which planners continuously refine planning quality to meet public demands. This constitutes an ideal planning mindset, distinct from rational planning frameworks that entirely disregard emotional variables.

No clear dividing line separates emotion and rationality. Within contemporary urban societies, residents simultaneously exhibit emotional subjectivity and rational agency. A coherent conceptual framework for urban emotion research is required to untangle this complex dynamic. As an integrative applied discipline, urban planning can draw insights from philosophy, psychology and sociology, fields with dedicated emotional research agendas. This paper argues Scottish philosopher David Hume’s theory of emotion provides a viable framework for examining emotion’s role in planning[33], as his philosophy interconnects emotion, morality and public interest — a foundational theoretical basis for public-interest-oriented urban planning to address urban emotional concerns.

Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature constructs a human mental conceptual system grounded in empirical observation of human nature, unpacking the relationship between emotion and rationality. Hume categorizes all mental contents as perceptions, subdivided into impressions and ideas. Impressions are vivid, intense lived experiences split into two types: sensory impressions (feelings) — perceptions of color, scent, taste, pleasure and pain — and reflective impressions (passions/emotions). Ideas, by contrast, constitute thought rather than emotion: faint, low-vividness mental copies of impressions; relationships between ideas are derived through reason, generating factual beliefs. For instance, entering a severely polluted district first sparks sensory discomfort (feeling), then low mood or anger (reflective impression), eventually forming an idea that air pollution provokes anger. Reasoning links this idea to associated concepts such as factory emissions within the district. Comprehending the interplay between rationality and emotion is therefore critical for planners seeking to understand urban residents’ moods and sentiments. As a pioneering empiricist, Hume famously stated: “The liveliest thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.” His theory systematically connects human sensation, emotion, ideas and rationality within mental processes. Accepting Hume’s framework, rational planning must prioritize urban emotion, continuously monitoring shifts in public emotional satisfaction.

Hume further establishes that emotion originates from sensation, a necessary prerequisite for human action. Behavioral aims are driven by desire, passion, mood and preference. Humans instinctively pursue pleasure and avoid suffering, acting exclusively through emotional motivation; rationality alone cannot generate behavioral impetus, nor can belief independent of sentiment. Emotion determines behavioral motives and objectives, while rationality serves merely as a tool to achieve such ends. Human social conduct carries moral weight, evaluated by whether objectives align with goodness. Emotion forms the basis of moral judgment, as the value of goals derives from affective responses to actions and actors, rather than rational deduction. Morality can only shape behavior by engaging human emotion. Accordingly, urban emotion operates not merely as an evaluation metric for planning and design outcomes, but also as a foundational reference for defining planning objectives. Rational planning that mechanically follows formal standards without accounting for urban emotion becomes dogmatic practice devoid of human warmth.

Over years of field observation in Pearl River Delta urban villages, the author notes migrant new residents enjoy stable livelihoods within these communities, supported by sound neighborhood management, clean streets and standardized waste disposal. Building quality remains intact with no dilapidation, while narrow building setbacks and street widths — arising from rural homestead development — only create engineering risks (fire hazards, overhead object falls) resolvable via minor micro-renewal rather than large-scale demolition and reconstruction. Many urban villages house tens of thousands of migrant residents, hundreds of small retail businesses and over a thousand local jobs, sustaining vibrant daily community activity year-round. Yet some municipal governments target these stable, functional working-class neighborhoods for high-end residential or non-essential commercial redevelopment. Such schemes fundamentally disregard the livelihood, employment and emotional well-being of thousands of village residents. If planners possessed compassion for these residents, understood their anxiety at displacement from secure living and employment spaces, and recognized the hardship, low mood and helplessness triggered by forced relocation, alternative preservation-oriented renewal strategies would be prioritized. Differing degrees of recognition toward residents’ emotional costs yield divergent planning value orientations, objectives and design proposals.

Extending Hume’s thought, German sociologist Max Weber distinguishes two forms of rationality: value rationality and instrumental rationality. Value rationality defines worthy objectives, shaped by personal values, morality, faith and aesthetic judgment, closely tied to emotional fulfillment. Instrumental rationality encompasses technical knowledge and tools deployed to achieve value-rationality-derived goals. Weber’s dual rationality framework bridges sensory experience and rational analysis, offering critical inspiration for integrated sensory-rational urban planning.

Even with a coherent emotional research conceptual system, methodological barriers persist: how to capture intangible, hard-to-measure urban emotions. Conventional social surveys incur high costs, face organizational hurdles and generate low-reliability data, limiting frequent deployment. The information age unlocks abundant quantifiable emotional data resources. Social media platforms encourage citizens to voluntarily publish opinions on urban phenomena, containing extensive positive and negative emotional lexicon. Sentiment analysis emerges as a versatile analytical tool, automatically extracting public viewpoints, emotional evaluations, attitudes and moods from user-generated social media text[35]. Mining such datasets generates actionable emotional insights linked to built environments.

International research teams have deployed sentiment analysis for urban planning applications, analyzing Twitter user emotional responses to urban public green spaces and large-scale urban sports events[36-37], alongside studies integrating urban emotion into digital-era planning workflows[38-39]. Artificial intelligence machine learning techniques can identify unscripted genuine emotional expressions of diverse population groups within specific built environments via video footage. Domestic scholars including Chen Yitong et al. have begun examining emotional variables within urban planning frameworks[40].

Hume’s analysis of emotion and rationality does not distinguish whose emotions or rationality are under consideration. Within urban planning, the core tension lies between “others’” emotions and planners’ rationality. “Others” encompasses individual citizens and collective groups. Compared with professionally rational planners, the public’s emotional landscape is far more diverse and complex. Extensive research on urban residents’ emotional responses to built environments exists within urban sociology, urban psychology, urban design and architectural design, which this section will not recapitulate; focus is placed exclusively on how planners perceive, comprehend and interpret “others’” emotions.

Planners’ core work leverages specialized planning knowledge to construct or upgrade built environments satisfying public demands. Within planned cities, residents — especially migrant new citizens — can only passively occupy existing built environments unless they relocate entirely. Yi-fu Tuan similarly observes: “The city is an environment arranged for you by others, catering to daily necessities with limited personal choice.”[41] This creates a unique asymmetric planner-public relationship: planners act as proactive service providers, while residents remain passive recipients. Information asymmetry and unequal power dynamics separate the two sides. Planners possess technical expertise and operate rationally; Chinese planning departments fall under government administration, granting discretionary authority over implementation. The general public lacks professional training, reasoning intuitively through personal lived experience to evaluate planning impacts, passively adapting to predefined spatial layouts. Urban planning constitutes a highly specialized yet profoundly public domain; despite statutory public participation mechanisms, engagement depth remains insufficient in practice, with constrained choice sets, often devolving into tokenistic formal consultation or extreme irrational public pushback.

Planners must authentically grasp public demands and lived experiences, requiring empathy and compassion. Empathy describes the first-person capacity to deeply apprehend another individual’s inner mental life, serving as a prerequisite for compassion[42]. Hume identifies compassion as an innate human sentiment, foundational to moral judgment and ethical conduct. Compassion alone enables comprehension of others’ lived experience, constituting the sole source of moral sentiment and the bedrock of social ethical values; only empathy and compassion motivate stewardship of collective and public interests[43].

Rational planning workflows include investigation, analysis and design, deploying technical expertise to achieve predefined objectives, yet target public groups may not endorse or accept such planning aims. Residents develop Yi-fu Tuan’s topophilia toward their living and working environments, reacting to planning proposals through subjective, sensory emotional responses. Planners’ empathy bridges rational technical analysis and public subjective experience, serving as a medium to capture sensory public perceptions. Insufficient empathy restricts planners’ cognitive capacity and limits acquisition of experiential public knowledge. Planners’ rational and sensory cognition are interdependent and mutually reinforcing: rational analysis emerges from sensory observation, while subsequent subjective experience validates the reasonableness of rational conclusions.

All core Chinese urban planning textbooks advocate human-centered principles, yet practice fails to adequately recognize and incorporate urban residents’ emotions. What built environment attributes foster humane cities? How can spatial planning reserve sufficient land to construct such attributes equitably across populations? How to create design opportunities for urban and architectural designers? Planning-level schemes must address the allocation, scale and distribution of emotion-relevant public amenities (public plazas, parks, green spaces, commercial streets, children’s playgrounds, sports facilities) and formalize such provisions on planning drawings. Spatial planning requires comparative scheme evaluation: for identical green space quotas, should one large central park be constructed, or a network of small, widely distributed, accessible pocket parks? Should green belts be allocated to inaccessible arterial road medians, or within adjacent residential neighborhoods? Must industrial parks be landscaped as garden-style complexes? These are not neutral planning trade-offs, but value-laden questions of whom planning serves. Amid a reality prioritizing profit and grand vision, certain obvious dilemmas remain unresolved during planning workflows, yet neglecting such deliberations reflects planners’ core value systems, shaped fundamentally by their empathy and compassion toward target communities.

How can planners cultivate genuine empathy and build consensus with served communities? Western and domestic planning academia widely adopt Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory[44], the theoretical foundation of collaborative planning. Meaningful rational communicative action differs from casual dialogue, predicated on equality, mutual understanding and freedom from coercion, with linguistic structures facilitating authentic consensus-building. Simply put, all participants must fully comprehend discussion topics and engage without constraint to honestly express personal perspectives and feelings. Multiple Chinese cities have implemented community resident planners[45], a practice this paper argues creates actionable platforms for planners to operationalize communicative rationality and cultivate community empathy.

The core argument of this paper holds that urban emotion constitutes a critical metric of urban quality and cannot be overlooked within urban planning. Planners must cultivate objective empathy through equal dialogue with served communities to formulate equitable planning objectives, realized via rational planning instruments. Urban emotion is an intrinsic urban dimension. In an information age marked by increasingly vivid, intense public emotional expression, rational urban planning can no longer disregard affective factors. This paper first establishes the necessity of emotional consideration in planning, and drawing from affective philosophy, proposes constructing a conceptual framework within urban planning scholarship to strengthen planners’ capacity for sensory perception. Integrating urban emotion systematically into spatial planning and translating sociological and psychological emotion research into practical planning workflows represents a long-term research agenda, with this paper merely outlining its theoretical feasibility.

Four avenues advance sensory planning research and practice:

In summary, confronted with complex urban emotions and public demand for emotionally fulfilling high-quality urban living, planners require both rational objectivity and compassionate empathy. Rational planning devoid of compassion yields cold, inhumane spatial outcomes, while compassion unmoored from rational analysis generates flawed planning schemes. Over the past decades, Chinese urban planning’s primary mandate centered on constructing physical urban built environments. Amid the shift to high-quality development, a core future planning objective will be fulfilling residents’ welfare and emotional demands via spatial intervention. Achieving this requires upholding Jin Jingchang’s foundational vision: “Planners and designers need to understand users’ (residents’) wishes, feelings, psychological states and behavioral responses — that is, urban social psychological factors deserve due attention.”

The first draft benefited from constructive feedback by scholars and peers including Wang Jianguo, Xia Haishan, Chen Yulin, He Qiong, Wang Jinshuo and Ren Shuai. The second draft received detailed, insightful reviews from Professors Han Xili and Zhao Wenqiang, to whom the author extends sincere gratitude.

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① This division is not absolute. Within China’s statutory urban planning system, master plans and regulatory detailed plans belong to the planning tier, while construction detailed plans incorporate extensive urban design work; many urban planners also practice urban design.② Translated by the author from the English version of the Charter of Athens.③ Additionally, American planning scholar John Forester examined planners’ and community residents’ emotional expressions and their impacts on planning decisions and actions[25-26]. His observations show planners subjectively believe they mediate planning issues rationally, yet their personal moods and worries inevitably shape planning workflows. Danish scholar Bent Flyvbjerg’s research demonstrates planners’ excessive optimistic sentiment generates planning fallacies[27]. However, this paper excludes analysis of planners’ own emotions and their impacts on planning processes and outcomes.④ Partial content of this section is excerpted from the author’s previously published paper Exploring Ethical Issues in Urban Planning from an Epistemological Perspective, Urban Planning International, 2024.

Liu Zhi, 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.

Chief Editor: Lu XiaowenDigital Editor: Li Xiaowen