Attention economics concerns itself with the study of the allocation of attention, conceptualized as a scarce resource. In this essay I relate fundamental insights from attention economics to recent advances in a specific type of artificial intelligence known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAIs GPT. I argue that the development leap known as the ‘LLM revolution’ can be expected to have a fundamental impact on planning practice. However, we should be careful not to stare ourselves blind at the expectation that LLMs will necessarily always deliver superior ‘intelligence’. Rather, it may be more helpful to think of them as providing relatively cheap synthetic competent attention, considering that attention scarcity rather than information/knowledge scarcity is the critical bottleneck within many contexts of contemporary planning practice. The essay attempts to tease out the implications of such a perspective, with a particular focus on what this could mean for the future of the planning profession.

Denna forskningsrapport presenterar ett kunskapsunderlag om icke-bindande strategisk regional planering, specifikt hur denna planeringsprocess skapar samhällsvärde genom att bidra med ett regionalt perspektiv på planeringsfrågor med inflytande på regionala aktörers dialog och beslut, samt hur dessa beslut kan omvandlas till specifika avsiktsförklaringar och (sam)handling. 

Region Stockholm arbetar i skrivande stund med att ta fram en ny Regional utvecklingsplan för Stockholmsregionen, RUFS 2060. RUFS är inte juridiskt bindande plan, utan vägledande för efterföljande samhällsplanering, och således är förverkligandet av planens målsättningar och prioriteringar beroende av samverkan mellan många olika aktörer inom Stockholms län, nämnvärt de 26 kommunerna. Författarnas uppdrag har varit att ta fram ett kunskapsunderlag för Region Stockholms arbete med att vidareutveckla samverkansprocesser- och strukturer för genomförandet av RUFS, baserat på forskning om regional planering inom Sverige och Europa. 

Rapporten är baserad på en omfattande översikt av internationell akademisk forskning inom samhällsplaneringsfältet (strategisk rumslig planering och regional planering); många av de teoretiska utgångspunkterna härstammar även från forskning om styrning och offentlig förvaltning. Grålitteratur relevant för regional planering i svensk kontext har även inkluderats och en selektiv dokumentstudie utförts med analys av policydokument och samrådshandlingar relaterade till regional utveckling inom Stockholmsregionen. 

Ett av rapportens bidrag som möjligtvis är av störst intresse för samhällsplaneringspraktiker är att den diskuterar och vidareutvecklar processmodeller för samverkan/samhandling som använts flitigt inom regionalt utvecklingsarbete i Sverige: samverkanstrappan, Forum-Arena-Court-modellen, och begreppet “samverkande governance” som motsvarar självförstärkande styrning mot samhandling. 

Regional planering i Sverige ter sig vara mitt i ett uppsving, men har inte ännu riktigt funnit sin identitet. För att förverkliga sin fulla potential behöver den regionala planeringspraktiken nå självinsikt kring sitt samhällsvärde och föra fram en övertygande berättelse om hur den skapar detta bärde gentemot andra samhällsaktörer.

This article investigates the integration of quasi-market mechanisms in intra-governmental decision-making for spatial planning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the institutional work that goes into producing market-emulating behaviours through an examination of the process by which Swedish Negotiated Development Agreements are developed and drafted. We demonstrate that the organisational procedures behind the Negotiated Development Agreements were purposely designed to reconstruct the ‘rules of the game’ for the allocation of public infrastructure funding and actor interaction, introducing elements of scarcity, competition, bidding, and trading into the decision-making process. Our analysis illuminates the on-the-ground institutional work through which core components of neoliberal ideology are embedded into the very structure and operation of intra-state decision-making, thereby generating new forms of hybrid urban governance and destabilising established expectations about what the state is, and the principles according to which it operates.

Smart city control rooms are prominent components of the smart city discourse. They embody a long-standing dream to visualize and manage multiple urban processes in real time through the collation of data flows. Previous research has produced important insights into the design, construction and operation of these facilities. However, this research has largely overlooked the fundamental changes to political and institutional conditions of the city that take place through the implementation of smart city control rooms. In this article, we examine how smart city control rooms are reconfiguring local governance landscapes in India through an in-depth case study of the city of Kochi. We apply the notion of the urban governance dispositif to Kochi's control room in the making to characterize how the facility is co-created alongside a rewiring of the institutions, infrastructures and imaginaries of urban local governance in the city. We demonstrate how, in this process, the smart city control room extends central government control and strengthens central and state government collaboration in urban local governance while legitimizing ICT companies as key actors of urban development. This study illustrates how smart city projects—even when technically stumbling—generate fundamental long-term implications to how cities are understood and managed.

This chapter brings a suburban fringe residential development in Australia into dialogue with 'smart' initiatives in mosquito management. Our example illustrates inadvertent intensification of non-human presence, especially mosquito breeding, through its development emphases on riparian aesthetics and on economics, which leave 'smart' control solutions to individual householders. Inspired by thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Robert Chia, and François Jullien, we suggest that an approach of 'upstream' investigation into the production of conditions of co-becoming can function as an alternative to established 'downstream' mosquito management practices premised on control and eradication. We conclude that forms of smart urban planning and residential estate development might rely less on artificial intelligence and Wi-Fi technology than a smarter appreciation of development milieus.

In response to the changing landscape of planning actors, planning literatures are exploring the implications that the extended presence of consultants have on planning processes. From relying on assumptions about “the primacy of public planners and/or definitions of a public interest” (Raco, 2018: 124), recent attention to planning consultants complicates presumptions about their expanded presence as singlehandedly implying a privatization of urban planning (Inch et al., 2023; Sturzaker and Hickman, 2023). In this paper, we take cue on these works by adding complexity and nuance to the role that planning consultants are playing in planning processes. Through an understanding of expertise as emergent, performed and thus in constant flux (Björkman and Harris, 2018), we ask: how are planning consultants conceiving of their expertise, and how do they situate their expertise in relation to other planning actors?

Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric “bubbles” through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purposeful affective engineering is very difficult to achieve–and one cannot expect that their eventual outcomes can be predicted on the basis of the ambitions that underpin them. Therefore, it is crucial to remain attentive to questions concerning the variegated, distributed and often unexpected effects of such endeavors.