International Planning Studies

Making sense of actually existing metropolitan planning: practices, capacities and contemporary displacements

Introduction

Over recent decades, metropolitan planning has become a central – albeit still blurred and unstable – object of urban and regional studies and planning, from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. In a context shaped by planetary urbanization, global economic integration and the rescaling of the state, metropolitan areas concentrate a substantial share of today’s major sociospatial challenges: the impact of the climate crisis, the need to provide critical infrastructures, the presence of persistent sociospatial inequality etc., all to be addressed in a regime of fragmented governance and scarce coordination of public policies across functional jurisdictions whose geometries are variable, continuously overflowing, and increasingly blurred (Scott, 2001; Brenner 2004; Storper, 2013; Bassand, 1993).

Despite significant advances in formal knowledge, metropolitan governance and planning continues to occupy a rather ambiguous position within the discipline. On the one hand, it has been the object of strong normative prescription, associated with ideals of territorial coherence, institutional efficiency, and inter-municipal coordination. On the other hand, its effective capacity to guide decision-making, articulate sectoral policies or structure strategic investment has been increasingly called into question. This gap between normative ambition and material effects constitutes one of the core dilemmas of contemporary metropolitan planning and provides the point of departure for this special issue.

Against this backdrop, we propose to approach metropolitan planning through a deliberately pragmatic and critical notion: that of actually existing metropolitan planning. Rather than evaluating institutional or regulatory frameworks and instruments against idealized models, systems or typologies, this approach shifts attention toward the analysis of how existing metropolitan territories are effectively designed and governed: through which practices, strategies, coalitions, state capacities and situated institutional and spatial arrangements. In line with recent approaches in urban and regional studies and planning, the focus is less on what planning ought to be and more on what it actually does – or fails to do – in specific contexts (Healey, 2015; Berglund-Snodgrass & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2020; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Raco and Savini, 2019).

This special issue positions within a series of contemporary displacements in metropolitan planning theory and practice that challenge the discipline’s foundational assumptions as consolidated during the twentieth century. In particular, it engages with six interrelated lines of transformation: (1) the turn toward planning as a situated material practice; (2) the emergence of experimental forms of territorial governance and planning; (3) the growing centrality of infrastructures as technologies of metropolitan governance; (4) an emphasis on concrete, fragmented, and differentiated state capacities; (5) a shift beyond metropolitan functional areas as privileged units of analysis toward extended and dynamic spatial units; and (6) the proliferation of analytical concepts –such as the performative power of plans, soft planning or heterodox planning– aimed at capturing the politics of planning where its effects are deferred, partial or of low intensity. From this perspective, the objective of the issue is not to formulate a new general theory of metropolitan planning, but rather to contribute to an empirically informed and conceptually realistic understanding of its contemporary modes of existence.

Metropolitan planning knowledge: state of the art and limits

The literature on metropolitan regions has historically developed around at least two major analytical frameworks (Zimmermann, Galland and Harrison, 2020). A first body of work has approached metropolisation through abstract and generalising theoretical perspectives, situating it within the broader contexts of globalisation, neoliberalism, and the political economy of advanced capitalism (Scott, 2001; Brenner, 2004; Storper, 2013). From this viewpoint, metropolitan regions are understood as spatial expressions of wider structural dynamics associated with productive restructuring, financialisation, inter-urban competition, etc. A second framework adopts a more empirical and comparative approach, aimed at analysing how concepts, governance models or institutional arrangements operate in concrete situations, across different national contexts and political conjunctures. These studies focus on processes rather than forms and have contributed to consolidating the notion of metropolisation as a relational phenomenon that articulates urban restructuring and global dynamics in the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist regime (Salet et al., 2003; Kantor et al., 2012; Nelles et al., 2018; De Mattos, 2001; Font et al., 2014).

Nevertheless, despite the richness of this body of work, research specifically focused on metropolitan planning remains relatively limited and fragmented. Most contributions concentrate on single case studies – often with a historicist bias centred on planners and plans – of emblematic global cities, or on sectoral analyses focused on transport and service networks (Esteban 2012; Alexander 2002; among others). The few systematic comparative studies tend to rely on quantitative indicators and privilege functional or infrastructural dimensions (Julià 2006; Rubbo 2019; among others). Qualitative approaches that examine instruments, processes, and governance and legal frameworks have shown, however, that metropolitan planning constitutes a deeply hybrid practice, situated between the strategic and the regulatory, between the formal and the informal and between the local and the regional (Healey, 2006; Balducci et al., 2017; Lefèvre, 1998; Elinbaum and Galland, 2016; Casavola et al., 2025). From this perspective, the metropolitan level appears less as a fully institutionalised scale and more as an interstitial, experimental and contingent one.

The European experience clearly illustrates these tensions. Despite the development of sophisticated methodologies to delineate functional urban areas – such as the FUAs promoted by the OECD and the EU (OECD 2012, 2013; Dijkstra et al., 2019) – and the proliferation of metropolitan governance arrangements, existing models display marked heterogeneity in terms of institutionalisation, competences, and capacities (Casavola et al., 2025; Salet et al., 2015; Zimmermann et al., 2020; ESPON, 2018, 2021; Cotella et al., 2021). Even where robust national institutional arrangements exist, metropolitan governance tends to operate as an experimental field of statecraft, subject to functional rescaling, local translations and unstable political compromises (Tomàs 2012, 2016, 2020).

Metropolitan planning is a rather consolidated practice in North America and Australia (Rothblatt, 1994; Bunker et al., 2009). In the United States, perhaps due to more extensive urbanisation dynamics and a lower level of fragmentation in national institutional constraints, the attention has shifted from metropolitan regionalism and the related planning experiences that emerged and consolidated in the second half of the previous century (Bromley & Dniels, 2001; Brenner, 2002) to so-called megaregions, i.e. connected networks of metropolitan areas that transcends states’ boundaries (Dewar and Epstein, 2007). Also in China the concept of megaregions has attracted wide attention, driving a paradigm shift from metropolisation to ‘multi-city regionalism’ and consolidating as the main policy objective of contemporary state planning (Wang et al., 2024).

Whereas almost everywhere in the world attempts have been developed to address urbanisation dynamics from a metropolitan perspective, in several contexts these initiatives are undermined by structural conditions of fragmented statehood, territorial inequality, and weak intergovernmental coordination. For instance, recent literature concerning Latin American countries converges in pointing to a persistent paradox: the existence of formally innovative, strategic, and discursively sophisticated metropolitan plans with a very limited capacity to guide decisions, coordinate investments, or regulate the production of space (Galland & Elinbaum, 2018; Cabrera, et al., 2025; Elinbaum, Vicuña and Valenzuela, 2025). These “zombie plans” – ineffective yet legally in force – reveal that the central problem is not the absence of planning, but its structural disconnection from actually existing state capacities. Similar challenges have been detected elsewhere across the Global South (Rukmana, 2020).

Recent trends in planning and the contemporary crisis of the discipline

The persistent gap between the normative frameworks of metropolitan planning and their actual effects is embedded in a broader crisis of the field of urban and regional planning. Since the critique of the rational-comprehensive model in the 1960s and 1970s, through the neoliberal subordination of planning to market logics from the 1980s onward, and the fragmentation associated with multilevel governance, the discipline’s foundational assumptions have been progressively unsettled. Today, these trajectories converge in an epistemic and material crisis marked by the limits of anticipatory knowledge, the deterritorialization of decision-making, overlapping systemic crises, and the erosion of the planner’s expert monopoly in the context of mass digitalization and artificial intelligence. Far from being resolved through new totalising paradigms, these conditions have translated into a reorientation toward more empirical, situated, and materialist approaches that question the epistemological and political foundations of the discipline.

One of the most significant shifts has been the turn toward analysing planning as a situated material practice. Rather than assessing plans in terms of normative coherence, attention is directed to administrative routines, ad hoc technical devices, professional practices, and concrete state capacities. Concepts such as actually existing planning, performative knowledge, or situated state capacity make it possible to analyse planning as ordinary institutional labour, marked by frictions, improvisations, and translations, rather than as a rational exercise of anticipation (Raco and Savini, 2019). This turn is articulated with a critical reconceptualisation of experimental planning. In contrast to the exhaustion of celebratory narratives associated with urban innovation (for example, smart cities), a notion of pragmatic – rather than utopian – experimentation has emerged, characterised by provisional, reversible, and frequently unsuccessful trials, deployed under conditions of structural constraint and permanent uncertainty (Evans et al., 2016; Karvonen et al., 2014; Caprotti & Cowley, 2017).

In parallel, recent scholarship has redefined infrastructures as a form of territorial governance, shifting the focus of planning from the ordering of land surfaces (zoning) toward the strategic management of flows, corridors, and nodes. Ports, logistics corridors, energy systems, and digital platforms operate as central devices of infrastructural statecraft, reconfiguring scales of state intervention and modalities of territorial control (Schindler & Kanai, 2021; Cowen, 2023; Easterling, 2015). This perspective is closely connected to processes of regional administrative digitalisation and metropolitan e-governance, which reorganise state capacities through harmonisation and centralisation of digital cadastres, spatial data infrastructures, and algorithmic systems of territorial calculation. Rather than interrogating technology in the abstract, these works examine how digitalisation reconfigures administrative routines and forms of spatial decision-making (Potts, 2020; Leszczynski 2023).

At the same time, a shift is consolidating beyond the “metropolitan area” as the privileged unit of analysis, toward extended and operational territories – logistics hinterlands, energy landscapes, transport corridors – where supralocal planning operates in decisive yet rarely explicit ways (Brenner 2019; Kanai & Schindler, 2019). In this context, mid-range concepts – the performative power of plans, soft planning or heterodox planning – have proliferated in order to capture forms of post-metropolitan or proto-metropolitan governance characterised by low visibility and capillary effects (Griggs et al., 2020; Elinbaum, 2020; Haughton et al., 2010; Cavaco et al., 2023; Gunder & Hillier, 2009; Gunder, 2010).

In sum, the contemporary crisis of planning should not be interpreted as a disciplinary void, but rather as a shift toward situated, material, and operational forms of knowledge production. This special issue is fully embedded in this shift, proposing to analyse metropolitan planning from below, through its structural inertias, state capacities, and actually existing practices. More in particular, the editors welcome contributions focusing (albeit not exclusively) on one or more of the issues below. Contributions comparing more than one case are also welcomed.

• Material planning practices, administrative routines, and situated state capacities in the production of metropolitan territory
• Metropolitan pragmatic planning experimentation, provisional institutional arrangements, and contingent coalitions in contexts of structural constraint
• Metropolitan infrastructures as dispositifs of statehood: the management of flows, corridors, and nodes in the reconfiguration of scales of intervention
• Metropolitan administrative digitalization, algorithmic platforms, and new forms of territorial calculation and visualization in e-governance and planning
• Beyond functional metropolitanism: extended territories, logistical hinterlands, energy landscapes, and post-metropolitan planning and governance
• The performative power of metropolitan plans, soft planning, and deferred effects: the gap between normative ambition and material outcomes
• Metropolitan institutional fragmentation, intergovernmental coordination, and unstable political settlements in multilevel contexts
• Metropolitan sociospatial inequality, differentiated infrastructure provision, and territorial justice in planning and governance

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