Incomplete Cities: Critical Urban Geography and the Reimagining of City Planning

1. Introduction: Cities, Uneven Urbanization, and the Contemporary Urban Question

Everything reminded Kiku of the human body diagram that hung in the school science classroom. The physiological systems and organs drawn on that figure were the same as those of this city: the raw materials entering were the food going down the throat; the power plants were the city’s lungs; and the offices of government and business, the digestive system that absorbs all available resources. The cables dangling everywhere were the nervous system; the streets were its veins and arteries; and the people, its cells. The port was an open mouth, and the airport runway, the tongue [1].

Cities are widely recognized as centers of social life, carriers of our economies, and custodians of culture, heritage, and tradition [2]. Far from passive containers, they function simultaneously as observatories that register global turbulence and as laboratories in which new socio-spatial arrangements are tested and contested. The twenty-first century is widely heralded as urban: an ever-larger share of humanity will reside in cities, and urban formations occupy pivotal positions in the global economy, environmental change, social inequality, and political transformation [3]. This conjuncture has been forged through the consolidation of postindustrial urbanism—marked by economic deregulation (or, more precisely, re-regulation in favor of firms), the retrenchment and market-like reorganization of public services, the contraction of the social safety net, and the expansion of punitive governance, all justified through the tropes of technical efficiency, fiscal integrity, and individual responsibility [4]. Accordingly, the present is best characterized not merely as an “urban age” but as an era in which city-regions sit at the heart of interlocking economic, ecological, and societal crises that are reshaping our world [5].

Against this backdrop, urban studies has a long pedigree in geography and the social sciences, yet contemporary conditions demand renewed inquiry for at least two reasons. First, in the twenty-first century, the majority of the world’s population lives in urban spaces. Second, current urban processes are complex and geographically variegated: while many countries in sub-Saharan Africa continue to experience rapid urbanization, China has largely consolidated a predominantly urban society with the world’s largest urban population; across North America, numerous cities are undergoing processes of shrinkage and degrowth; and across Europe, urban dynamics diverge both between and within regions, ranging from gentrification in central districts to continued suburban expansion and sprawl.

2. The Special Issue: Themes, Methods, and Comparative Insights

Responding to these dynamics, the Special Issue “The Study of Urban Geography and City Planning” assembles fourteen contributions that take the pulse of the contemporary urban question across diverse geographies, methods, and policy arenas. Together, these articles map the field along several intersecting axes: programmatic syntheses that chart a shift from segregation to fragmentation in the global literature; inquiries into sustainability, spatial justice, and social cohesion through urban renaturalization; and analyses of urban tourism resilience that leverage digital heritage visibility—as demonstrated by an article in this Special Issue on Bucharest [6]. They are complemented by studies on pedestrian network continuity—an empirical contribution documents that 67.55% of Panama City’s network is continuous but that business encroachments and service-station frontages are major sources of fragmentation, with 46.79% of bus stop–crossing distances exceeding 100 m, calling for pedestrian-safety-centered design standards [7]; on the demographic and spatial logics linking populations and football stadiums in Romania [8]; and on regulatory imaginaries that operationalize degrowth principles in zoning [9]. Further threads examine affective bonds and place attachment in urban settings, diagnose retail desertification and the prospect of a “retail-less city” [10], complicate canonical narratives of suburbanization and spatial assimilation, as shown by the Minneapolis–St. Paul case study of Southeast Asian former refugees [11], and review ecological planning tools to reactivate vacant land, foregrounding equity, resilience, and governance as cross-cutting agendas and methodological pluralism as a defining strength. For an up-to-date systematic account of this shift, see the review article included in this Special Issue [12].

In addition, this collection amplifies comparative and policy-relevant insights through a spatial economic analysis of manufacturing agglomerations around Cape Town International Airport that illuminates airport-linked industrial corridors [13]; a study of state-led governance for community gardens in Shenzhen (“We Garden”) [14]; a network-analytic identification and weighting of urban-resilience indicators [15]; and an assessment of the non-linear relationships between urban density and per capita municipal spending in the United States [16]—together extending the portfolio toward infrastructure economies, green governance, risk analytics, and urban public finance.

Taken together, the contributions foreground equity, resilience, and governance as cross-cutting agendas while advancing methodological pluralism—from systematic reviews and case-comparative designs to network and visibility analytics—thereby providing a multi-scalar lens on the contradictory trajectories of growth, shrinkage, and socio-spatial recomposition in contemporary city-regions.

Building on this comparative portfolio, it is crucial to recognize that urbanization unfolds unevenly across regions and countries; urbanization is not a homogeneous process [17]. Local political–economic configurations, institutional arrangements, and socio-ecological conditions generate distinctive models of transformation that demand situated analysis [18]. Yet, alongside such specificity, comparative evidence indicates recurring regularities: although every city bears particular historical, biophysical, and contextual traits, many follow common laws of co-evolution, including a measurable homogenization of urban form over time [19]. These tensions have intensified with the advent of neoliberal globalization, which has generalized the capitalist city as the planet’s dominant socio-spatial formation [20]. Addressing them requires analytical strategies that connect macrostructural dynamics and micro-level practices, while theorizing and empirically examining the intermediate—meso—contexts (policy regimes, governance arenas, and spatial assemblages) through which they articulate [21].

3. Political Economy, Justice, and Planning for Equitable Urban Futures

Extending this line of argument, capitalism has long operated as a driver of territorial fragmentation and discontinuity: the growth of cities has been propelled to a significant extent by capitalist logics that reorganize space through selective investment, marginalization, and uneven development [22]. A generation of urban scholars—among them Neil Smith, Bob Jessop, Jamie Peck, and Neil Brenner—foregrounded the specifically urban articulation of these dynamics, variously labeled “urban neoliberalism” or “neoliberal urbanism,” as a defining condition of the contemporary capitalist city [20]. In this configuration, cities become strategic production platforms for the global economy, while functions of social reproduction are progressively externalized or eroded; urban territories are converted into test beds for entrepreneurial governance and circuits of rent extraction, intensifying the commodification of the city and recoding gentrification as a scalar instrument of global urban strategy [23]. Empirically, a contribution in this Special Issue demonstrates how retail desertification differentially unfolds across urban economy circuits in Barcelona—comparing a global strip (Passeig de Gràcia) with a local commercial strip (Sants–Creu Coberta)—and identifies it as a major driver of economic and landscape change [10]. The cumulative result is a pattern of urbanization marked by socio-ecological unsustainability and destructive tendencies—outcomes that demand a re-centering of critical urban theory and a renewed politics oriented to “cities for people, not for profit” [24]. Concretely, this Special Issue advances that agenda through a review article that examines how degrowth principles can be institutionalized via zoning—using Texas as a case to outline reforms that decouple planning from growth imperatives and reorient ordinances toward equity and ecological protection [9].

Viewed at a planetary scale, territorial and social inequalities are repeatedly denounced by normative agendas centered on the right to the city, urban justice, and sustainability. Yet explaining their production requires an analytical lens that attends not only to circuits of capital, global production networks, and state strategies, but also to social mobilizations and struggles, the concrete textures of everyday life, and embedded social relations—including gender and wage relations and the relation to nature [25]. From this vantage point, struggles of inhabitation—through which residents craft everyday responses to climate change—unfold through and against neoliberal deprivations, illuminating how claims to justice are articulated in lived space and time [3].

Turning to the normative terrain, critical urban theory entails both the critique of ideology and the critique of power, inequality, injustice, and exploitation—within and among cities [26]. From this vantage point, a horizon of more socially just, solidaristic, and democratic cities—set against the extension of privatopia—comes into view, with planning practice oriented to the co-presence of residential and non-residential uses rather than the rigid segregation that accompanied the proliferation of zoning [27]. Likewise, there is no justification for urban policies that privilege the interests of functional elites within neoliberalizing capitalism [28]. As recent critiques insist, the present urban landscape is not the outgrowth of inevitable progress but the cumulative effect of political decisions that prioritized private profit over social needs [29].

Over the subsequent decades, neoliberalization gradually but decisively reweighted urban governance: individuals gained territory over the collective, and markets over states. Privatization, (re)commodification, the deliberate ceding of policy arenas to market processes, deregulation, and decentralization came to dominate national and urban politics, under ideologies that prioritized individual choice and normalized virtually unlimited wealth accumulation; the result was a contraction of social-democratic welfare objectives and the consolidation of more liberal regimes [30]. In this context, the spatial structure of the city does not merely mirror social cleavages; it actively organizes and contributes to income inequality [31]. The proliferation of what Yiftachel terms “gray space”—developments, enclaves, populations, and transactions suspended between the “lightness” of legality/approval/safety and the “darkness” of eviction/destruction/death—creates pseudo-permanent margins that exist partially outside the gaze of state authorities and city plans [32]. As these dynamics sediment, cities exhibit pronounced intra-urban inequalities just as much as we observe inequalities between cities [31].

Given that most of the world’s population now resides in cities, contextualizing spatial (in)justice requires anchoring it in the specific conditions of urban life and in the collective struggles to secure more equitable access to the social resources and advantages that the city can provide [33]. Following Fainstein, an equitable distribution—primarily of housing—constitutes the first criterion for assessing whether a city is just, complemented by two secondary criteria: diversity, understood as openness to difference and the accommodation of culturally and economically varied neighborhoods; and democracy, measured by the degree to which community demands are incorporated into government policy [34]. This normative benchmark unsettles the long-standing assumption that growth—defined as the expansion of towns and cities in population, land area, and economic activity—is synonymous with prosperity, a conflation historically entangled with the logics of sprawl [35]. In fiscal terms, evidence from this Special Issue indicates that higher population-weighted density is associated with lower per capita municipal spending across several cost categories in U.S. cities—reinforcing the equity–efficiency case for compact urbanism [16].

From this perspective, the salient question is not whether cities grow, but how—and for whom—they grow: whether investments and planning decisions enlarge the stock of affordable housing, sustain difference, and translate situated claims into distributive and procedural justice. Complementing this lens, a review article in this Special Issue maps the multi-scalar links between place attachment, wellbeing, urban greenery, social participation, migration, gender/age, and walkability, deriving implications for equitable and healthy cities [36].

Operationalizing this normative horizon requires treating cities as complex, open-ended systems whose very incompleteness is a condition of possibility for collective making and remaking [37]. In this light, we consider urban planning a central instrument to contest predatory and socially unjust neoliberal urbanization. Crucially, this orientation is substantiated by a contribution in this Special Issue that examines an urban renaturalization project in Pontevedra (Spain), integrating socio-demographic and spatial-justice factors to relate residents’ perceptions and satisfaction to social cohesion and equity—thereby offering empirical guidance for participatory, justice-oriented design [38].

Geography must be applied: we must recognize the limits of plans, yet we must plan—the urban plan matters. At the same time, planning is not neutral; when tethered to place branding and “growth machine” coalitions, spatial planning processes risk reflecting a narrow set of interests rather than community needs, thereby reproducing inequality [39]. As contributions within this Special Issue, a systematic review synthesizes ecological planning tools for revitalizing urban vacant land and recommends stepwise, hybrid approaches that integrate substance- and process-oriented instruments to support equitable, resilient greening [40]; a study analyzes Shenzhen’s “We Garden” program as a top–down governance approach that mobilizes nonprofit intermediaries to convert idle public land into green space and institutionalizes public participation for environmentally just urban management [14]; and an ANP-based assessment of urban resilience in Sanandaj (Iran) shows how infrastructural systems, public institutional capacity, and education emerge as influential levers while the most vulnerable zones are identified for targeted intervention—thus illustrating how indicator frameworks can anchor equitable, resilience-oriented planning [15].

Translating these commitments into practice requires treating cities as complex, open-ended systems whose very incompleteness constitutes a condition of possibility for collective making and remaking [37]. In this light, we consider urban planning a central instrument for contesting predatory and socially unjust neoliberal urbanization.

Advancing this agenda, what is required is a substantive realization of urban sustainability—understood, in a global perspective, as the planning and management of settlements within their social, economic, and environmental contexts so as to secure the wellbeing of current populations without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same [41]. Moreover, recent interventions insist that the debate must shift from generic sustainability toward climate urbanism, explicitly centering mitigation, adaptation, and justice in the face of escalating climate risks—thereby aligning decarbonization with distributive and procedural equity and retooling governance to prioritize vulnerability reduction and collective capacities to act [42].

4. Conclusions and Future Research Directions

Social processes are fluid, whereas territory is too often treated as inert; yet urbanization is, by definition, unfinished. Cities are better understood as ongoing formations—contingent, experimental, and contradictory—rather than completed artifacts, a view consistent with the claim that “the urban” is an incomplete and contingent process [43]. Taking incompletion seriously implies recognizing that the geographies we inhabit remain open to reconfiguration and that urban scholarship is correspondingly provisional and iterative.

In this spirit, understanding the cities we inhabit has never been more urgent. We advocate a sustained dialog between Critical Urban Social Geography and City Science that is empirically rigorous, theoretically reflexive, and publicly engaged. Such a program entails “hopeful geographies” that proactively interrogate and address pressing urban problems—housing conflict and eviction, surveillance and segregation, mental health and homelessness, gentrification and touristification—treating these not as isolated pathologies but as interdependent socio-spatial processes whose trajectories can be redirected through collective action and democratic planning.

Situated within the inescapable context of the Anthropocene, the city must be reframed as part of the solution rather than persist as the problem. Doing so requires strategic optimism and a radical openness to new ideas, methodologies, and coalitions, anchored in a critical spatial perspective that foregrounds justice as both principle and practice [33]. If urbanization is necessarily incomplete, then so too is the horizon of urban possibility; the task ahead is to convert that incompleteness into a capacity for equitable transformation.

Realizing this program demands more open forms of planning—arenas in which citizens, planners, and even visitors co-experiment to co-produce a more liveable city [44]. It must be grounded in broad, transparent democratic consensus that departs from the elitist and closed decision-making too often found in urban development [45]. Following Lefebvre, the urban should be organized for its users—not for speculators, capitalist developers, or the technocratic plans of experts [46]. Recentering human health and wellbeing as the telos of planning [47], we advocate alternative, radically democratic, and sustainable forms of urbanism [48]. This commitment is all the more urgent amid the rise of “anti-woke” agendas in parts of the West—which contest the very vocabulary of justice (where “woke” refers to awareness of, and concern with, racial and related social justice) and risk undermining hard-won advances in inclusion and equity [49].

Looking ahead, we propose a research agenda that bridges macrostructural transformation and everyday urban life through comparative, longitudinal, and experimentally minded designs operating across macro–meso–micro scales. Future work should (i) consolidate a justice-centered climate urbanism by examining mitigation, adaptation, and loss-and-damage through distributional, procedural, and recognitional metrics; (ii) develop post-growth planning tools and evaluation frameworks that move beyond GDP toward capabilities, wellbeing, and ecological thresholds; (iii) interrogate the governance of critical infrastructures—logistics corridors and airports as well as green and social infrastructures—and their uneven effects across neighborhoods and regions; (iv) track the socio-spatial consequences of retail restructuring, platformization, and housing financialization, including displacement, surveillance, and the production of “gray spaces”; and (v) advance co-produced, open-science methods—participatory modeling, civic data observatories, causal and quasi-experimental evaluations, and auditable geospatial/AI analytics—with replication across Global North/South contexts. By aligning Critical Urban Social Geography and City Science around shared standards of rigor, transparency, and public engagement, the community can convert the acknowledged incompleteness of the urban into a generative capacity for equitable transformation, guiding planning institutions toward interventions that are empirically validated, climatically responsible, and democratically governed.