Rethinking urban planning with Jean-Luc Nancy: Plurality, coexistence, and judgment

Contemporary planning theory is marked by persistent tensions: between is and ought, ethics and politics, the good and the just, and rights and obligations. This paper revisits those tensions by reading them through Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of being-with. Nancy refuses any metaphysical grounding of the human, community, or the good life, and instead understands existence as exposure, finitude, and coexistence. On this basis, the paper argues that planning ethics can be recast as an originary ethos—hence a praxis—of being-with, where responsibility is categorical yet incalculable and cannot be reduced to procedural correctness or settled foundations. The paper’s contribution is a set of eight theses that translate Nancy’s ontology into a post-foundational orientation for planning: not operational guidelines, but critical-ethical bearings for judgment, participation, and plan-making under conditions of plurality.