Planning with Eyes of Kinship

Abstract

Every planning tradition inherits an image of the world before it inherits a method. This major research paper examines how modern planning has been shaped by a representational imagination that approaches the city as an object to be rendered visible, ordered, and eventually completed. It argues that the contemporary crisis of planning is therefore not solely technical, procedural, or political-economic, but hermeneutic: cities become increasingly legible through data, financial calculation, and spatial representation while the relations through which urban life is reproduced recede from life. Every planning tradition inherits an image of the world before it inherits a method. This major research paper examines how modern planning has been shaped by a representational imagination that approaches the city as an object to be rendered visible, ordered, and eventually completed. It argues that the contemporary crisis of planning is therefore not solely technical, procedural, or political-economic, but hermeneutic: cities become increasingly legible through data, financial calculation, and spatial representation while the relations through which urban life is reproduced recede from life. In response, my research develops Eyes of Kinship, a planning orientation grounded in sociogenic hermeneutics. Eyes of Kinship asks how inherited conceptions of the human, dwelling, property, care, and community become materialized through planning practices before any intervention begins. Its central theoretical movement, The Poetics of Planning, then reimagines planning not as the administration of completed objects but as the rhythmic composition and disclosure of living worlds. Through poiesis, opacity, metabolic transparency, symmathesy, and the hermeneutic spiral, planning becomes the cultivation of conditions through which memory, ecology, participation, and relation may continually gather without being finalized or possessed. The paper subsequently names Subprime Kinship as the financial capture of these compositional capacities, through which debt and property reorganize housing, family time, community, care, rest, and the political imagination around accumulation. Non-urban Urbanism offers a speculative response by asking how production, reproduction, extraction, dwelling, ecology, and care might become mutually responsible. Through Villagization and the Metropolitan Waystation, the paper proposes no completed model of the good city. Instead, it turns planning towards the unfinished vocation of disalienating the city and its citizens: making concealed metabolisms publicly intelligible while preserving the opacity through which collective life acquires memory, intimacy, and meaning.