Planners can neither comprehend nor act on the world in its entirety, and don’t need to fixate on meaningless particulars. Humans create a variety of social forms – governments, neighborhood associations, families – through which to achieve their purposes. And none of them exist in isolation; each requires other social forms and materialities to function effectively. The agency exists within a field of action that includes all of the forces operating on it. This article explores assemblage thinking to identifying the constituent forms of urban reality. It begins with the intellectual foundations of this approach, provides an example from New York City that illustrates how an assemblage might be imagined, and concludes by reflecting on the approach’s applicability to planning.

The paper deals with issues of individualization and sharing in the city. Growing preoccupations and attitudes of “bowling alone” are seemingly among the major features of current urban problems and conditions. The author makes three examples to argue that contemporary territories of social sharing are not driven by specific projects but the excitement for proximity in transgression. Forms and practices of social sharing in the city are addressed by a need of libérer de la solitude, of defense from growing economic problems, preoccupation for individualization and the perverse effects of overlapping exclusion forms and rhetoric of security. In the planning imaginary the society of individuals and the society of sharing have been reduced to the individual and the public city, the two major trajectories of urban development in the 20th century. These contemporary forms of individual and shared living in the city marks a distance from the modernist project.

This paper puts into question the category of public space, arguing that it is necessary more from a physical and functional perspective, than for its symbolic and relational implications (the latter being more emphasized by the planning literature on this theme). This position is based on the confutation of two major interpretations of public space in the planning debate: one acknowledging its centrality in the making of the public sphere; another exposing its progressive privatization (mostly driven by contractual communities and shopping malls). The authors argue that the production of public spheres doesn’t necessarily occur within public spaces, i.e. spaces of public property, whereas needs and demands of “truly” public spaces coming from minorities or marginal groups (homeless people, for example) calls property rights issues into play. On the other hand, criticized forms of closure such as the gated communities can be regarded as contractual and shared forms of production of collective spaces within a private property regime.

Over the last twenty years, urban studies and social sciences in general have witnessed an explosion of interest in Henri Lefebvre, manifested in a deluge of interpretations of his boundless legacy, especially by geographers. This article proposes to see the whole of Lefebvre’s thought, not as a “theory”, but as an intricate web of paths not all of which have been sufficiently investigated. In particular, it deals with two not easily reconcilable heritages that can be acknowledged, that of the philosophical milieu of the French Nietzsche Renaissance with its focus on the issue of difference, and that of orthodox Marxism, with its reluctance to fully accept the existence of a spatial dimension in the dynamics of the production of social relations. The paper then focuses on the concept of differential space and its explicative potential for an investigation on the theme of hospitality in the era of migration.

This paper’s main aim is re-thinking urban regeneration starting from more complex strategies based on articulated and plural urban imaginaries. Image-making processes should be based on the distinction between images of rebirth, more linked to local social contexts, and images of regeneration, more explicitly market-oriented, the former referring to the model of pedagogic city that some studies on urban rebirth are currently focusing on. In such a frame, the author argues that the continental paradigm of the creative city is wearing down whereas some innovative visions arise from cities of the Global South or from peripheral Europe.

The paper deals with issues of adaptation to climate change, focusing on relations between nature and society at the core of urban life, and questioning current approaches to sustainable planning. The author engages a critical discussion with two different theses on climate change, Parenti’s and Acot’s, both dealing, from very different perspectives, with causes and outcomes of such massive transformations on societal processes and natural resources. The claim for a human liberation ecology supports the author’s thesis of a stronger, ethical and political approach to urban issues related to climate change.