ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the need to rethink urban planning in the face of intersecting contemporary challenges. Managing urban growth amidst the complexities of current socio-spatial systems requires a fundamental revision of urban planning principles, narratives, methods, and governance. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of growing concerns and uncertainties related to expanded urbanisation, rising inequality, shrinking welfare states, housing exclusion, digitalisation, migration, and displacement, as well as climate and environmental change. As the interplay of these trends reshapes the urban space, the role of urban planning amplifies as a powerful tool for timely and adequately addressing the broad social, economic, political, and environmental pressures affecting cities worldwide. The chapter calls for a response from planning that adopts more transformative understandings and integrative approaches to mediate and create new meanings out of the co-evolving relationship between places, people, ecosystems, and politics in the city. Central to this transition is incorporating ageing as a key feature of urban society, which offers an opportunity to strengthen spatial planning, through life course, rights-based and citizenship-based perspectives. The chapter reflects on the prerequisite of reimagining older persons as new protagonists in urban life. It envisions transforming the way cities are conceived and organised to support well-being and life chances more equitably across diverse people and generations, balancing plurality with shared values, narratives, and governance to foster a renewed urban identity.
