Planning is any form of rational government of urban transformations provided with foresight capacities, a strategic vision, a model of governance, an idea of the nature of urban processes and their evolution. The unsolved question is if planning is capable to govern cities and territories as it would aim to do. Beyond its inner weakness (uncertain paradigm) and outer weakness (challenges from strong external powers aiming at privatizing goods and commons), the object itself of planning has changed. The big city or the big sprawl are uncertain objects, rising more doubts than certainties. It’s not casual if great part of urban planning focuses on micro-projects giving the intractability of the system for granted. Post-urban or meta-politan processes are unlikely and planning dealing with them seems desperate. That’s why unlikely planning has to turn into planning the unlikely, anticipation of future states of the world, adaptation to current processes, mitigation of their negative impacts. In the society of knowledge there’s conflict between ideas, principles, classes. Government deals with macro-processes, based on structural investments, as well as micro issues. Social cohesion and distributive justice, at the local level, are crucial. The post-democratic city is also post-political, as the cities are full of promises still unfulfilled. It is impossible to foresee, but the tension to the future is to be kept alive.

Different cities hosted very different types of protests, depending on the nature of the spaces under occupation. By building a movement that focused on actual public space, the Occupy movements did indeed evolve a new form of articulating citizenship by strategically deploying public spaces in the construction of a larger movement for democratic citizenship. But the ambiguous role that the commitment to physically occupying space played within the different urban factions of the larger movement, and the failure of these simultaneously-enacted, city-based protests to link larger citizenship concerns to social or legal rights to permanently occupy physical spaces, also limited the power of the movement both locally and nationally, further reflecting divisions within the movement about its larger political purpose. Although increased mobility in space can enable acts of protest, just as public spaces can serve as symbolic sites for enacting citizenship, the question of whether these and other built environmental factors will motivate political dissatisfaction remains an open question. When physical space for protest becomes a rare commodity, a city’s democratic and civic spheres are also under threat.

The paper’s main theme are the geopolitical effects of administrative boundary’s design at the urban and regional scale, in relation to spatial planning practices. To develop such a theme, the author refers to Foucault’s research on devices, discipline and security in particular. On a historical background, he acknowledges that the disciplinary device is the base for architectural heterotopias such as the Panopticon, whereas the security device works behind modern urban planning, land use and zoning in particular. As a public policy, spatial planning can be regarded as the art of governing systems of social relations on a territorial basis, inasmuch it deals with the design of borders which regulate land uses. Planning is double-faceted, both excluding and including, and therefore oppressive and emancipatory. If it’s impossible to overcome the dominating, coercive effects of planning – such as zoning, in some cases – it’s nonetheless worth practicing planning as something not too far from democracy.

The paper deals with three main breaks in the field of urban planning: the breaking up with the idea of growth, welfare and education. The author wanders if innovative ways in planning practice are effective or we’d better reflect upon them more carefully. In such a perspective, he suggests different moves, such as focusing on emotional dimensions of planning discourses (self-reference, cynicism, unrealistic attitude) to find out that none of these seems adequate for a realistic and non-resigned action. More generally, it is necessary to consider that, more than ever, planning is a matter of exception; a matter of de-politicizing; a matter of justtechnical procedures; a matter of power and social exclusion. The true problem of global western societies is the chasm between universalism and differentialism, as it works behind dilemmas on how to deal with socio-spatial issues in radically plural societies. Planners should dismiss a unitarian logic and “think by differences”, giving up with identity issues and focusing on conflicts, interests and cultures in specific time-space contexts.

Mind and city are equivalent machines. In both cases, works the basic rule of the theory of extended mind: environment counts to address knowledge. For more traditional cognitive science, inspired by artificial intelligence, mind is a semantic mechanism given its syntactic devices, based on strings codifying mental representations generated through physical structures of the brain. Switching from the mind to the city and the rules underlying urban mechanisms, the focus is on the physical structure of the city and the ways it influences the production of our thoughts and actions. To support this idea, the author evokes the medieval history of Bologna as a university venue: only after scholars came from all over Europe to study there, the Commune could develop, social relationships flourished, as well as trade. The analogy between mind and city is further developed discussing St. Augustine’s idea of the celestial city as an entity where urbs and civitas are never perfectly overlapping, but always coexisting in a problematic way.