Three Keynotes at the University of Helsinki — A Full Account from the Recording
WPSC 2026's third-day plenary brought three keynotes to the University of Helsinki's Great Hall — planning in China, the digital-transition panel, and the new geopolitics of planning. Reconstructed from the author's on-site audio recording.
On the morning of Wednesday, 1 July 2026 — the third day of the World Planning Schools Congress — the plenary left Aalto University's Otaniemi campus for the neoclassical Great Hall of the University of Helsinki's Main Building, on Senate Square. Under the congress theme Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Planning, three keynotes followed in succession: a three-thousand-year panorama of planning in China, a panel on the digital and sustainability transition, and a diagnosis of planning's new geopolitics.
This article reconstructs those three talks in more depth than the earlier summary, working from the author's own on-site audio recordings, transcribed with speech-recognition software (OpenAI Whisper, large-v3-turbo). Because the recordings capture accented English in a large, reverberant hall, the transcripts contain errors; the account below paraphrases faithfully and quotes only where the recording is clearly intelligible.
① Three Thousand Years, One Argument — Planning in China (LIU Jian, Tsinghua University)
Liu began with imperial China, where, he explained, planning's principal role before modern times was to materialize and demonstrate the authority of imperial power rather than to serve functional urban needs. At the level of the city, this logic can be read in capitals such as Beijing, whose layout followed a cosmological and ritual order (what he called, in Chinese, fengshui theory) linking the city's form to mountains and rivers. He illustrated this with the example of Beijing itself, sited near a river and enclosed by mountains, and with a second, unnamed city in southern China similarly framed by hills and waterways -- arrangements that provided shelter from winter winds and access to summer rainfall, while keeping settlements close enough to rivers for water and transport but set back from them to avoid flooding.
The rule and level of China's traditional planning was mainly to materialize, to demonstrate the authority of imperial power, and to enhance the reach of imperial power.
This same logic, he continued, extended down to the architectural scale: building codes regulated gate design, roof form, and building materials specifically to visually encode the social status of residents. A golden roof signaled an imperial or elite household, he noted, while commoners were confined to plain rooms and modest gates -- a physical hierarchy that built the structure of society directly into the built environment. Liu stressed that this system of imperially coded planning, operating simultaneously at the level of the capital, the regional city, and the small border or minority town, persisted for close to three thousand years before China's encounter with modernization in the mid-nineteenth century.
That encounter, he said, arrived through war and colonization. Treaty ports and foreign concessions along the coast and the Yangtze River -- his examples included Qingdao under German administration and the International Settlement in Shanghai -- became the vehicles through which modern, Western planning concepts and institutions were transplanted into China. Liu credited the Chinese entrepreneur and reformer Zhang Jian with translating these imported ideas into an early indigenous modern plan, at Nantong, a city north of Shanghai, marking the beginning of planning as a professional practice carried out by Chinese practitioners themselves rather than by foreign administrators.
The narrative then turned to the 1950s, when China adopted a planned economy under Soviet influence: 156 major industrial projects, assisted by the Soviet Union, were sited nationally and distributed across roughly seventy cities and towns, becoming a powerful driver of urban development. Liu illustrated this with Lanzhou, in western China, where industrial districts were laid out along the Yellow River with residential areas built up around them, transforming a traditional city into a major industrial one. He also described the socialist work-unit, or danwei, as the basic cell of this urban fabric -- a combined living and working community that supplied housing, employment, and services -- and linked it to the later "third front" construction campaign of the 1960s-80s, which redirected industry from coastal China into the interior for reasons of military defense, seeding a wave of new inland industrial cities.
Reform and opening up, Liu argued, marked a decisive turn: urbanization shifted from being merely a byproduct of industrial policy to an explicit driver of socioeconomic development in its own right. He described a sustained hyper-urbanization -- an urbanization rate rising at roughly one percentage point per year, translating into a huge annual influx of migrants seeking housing, jobs, and services -- accompanied by an unprecedented scale of construction and urban investment. This growth, he noted, helped make China the world's second-largest economy by 2012, with the country's population becoming majority urban around 2011. He traced how Beijing's own growth exemplified the pattern, from central-area redevelopment beginning in the early 1990s to the emergence of new towns and satellite districts at the metropolitan edge, alongside a broader proliferation of small towns and new-area development driven by industrial and economic policy nationwide.
As urbanization matured, Liu turned to its costs and to the more recent recalibration of Chinese planning around coordination and quality rather than sheer growth. He pointed to air pollution -- illustrated with a striking image of Beijing's smog in 2013 -- alongside widening regional disparities between east and west and between urban and rural areas, and the social segregation of housing that has accompanied rapid urban expansion. He described how fragmented, department-based planning systems (land use, environmental protection, and other sectoral plans operating with limited coordination) were consolidated after 2019 into a unified territorial and spatial planning system, designed to balance urban development, agricultural protection, and ecological protection -- anchored by a nationwide farmland "red line" and the safeguarding of mountains, rivers, woodlands, wetlands, and other non-construction land. He noted parallel efforts at regional coordination, citing the Yangtze River Delta as a case where competing upstream and downstream, and cross-provincial, interests over water and resources require deliberate mechanisms of cooperation.
In closing, Liu turned to the human and demographic dimension of this transition: rural-to-urban migration leaving "left-behind" children and aging populations in villages across the north and southwest, and, more recently, the onset of population decline and shrinking cities in parts of China, together with the pressures of an aging society and extreme weather associated with climate change. He described a shift toward community-based renewal -- resident community-planner schemes, participatory neighborhood workshops, and the 15-minute living circle -- as instruments for addressing these challenges at the everyday scale, alongside brownfield and wetland regeneration projects he cited in Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Beijing. He ended by returning to his opening thesis: that Chinese planning's constant, whether under empire, socialist industrialization, or market reform, has been its public role of identifying and solving problems, and that its future will continue to be shaped by the changing relationship between central and local government, and by the public's growing appetite to participate in decisions about their own living environment.
② Is Planning Worth Doing? — Redefining the Future of Planning (Neuvonen panel)
The plenary panel "Redefining the Future of Planning: Digital Advances," held on 1 July 2026 at the University of Helsinki and chaired by Aleksi Neuvonen, co-founder of Demos Helsinki, opened with a framing lecture rather than a simple introduction of panelists. Neuvonen argued that planning is, at its core, a practice of translating imaginaries and visions of the future into present-day action: sustainability and digital-transition discourses circulate as widely shared images that shape how people and organizations anticipate what is to come, and these images in turn are nested inside layers of formal targets, from global climate and biodiversity agreements down to national and city-level goals, which together define the boundaries within which planning operates. He was careful to note that the future itself cannot be known, and that what planners actually produce are useful, even necessary, fictions of the future dressed up as knowledge — a caution he suggested planning should own rather than disguise.
Neuvonen then laid out the central tensions of what he called the transition era. Efforts to decarbonize keep reproducing new forms of techno-optimism even as their proponents claim to be moving beyond growth-based thinking. Justice is repeatedly invoked as the banner under which transitions should proceed, yet disruptive economic and political forces make justice a slogan more often than a measurable effect. Green growth is promised, but no evidence yet exists of a full, global-scale decoupling of economic growth from ecological load. And artificial intelligence and digital tools are sold as engines of hyper-productivity, even as they raise fears of technological displacement and upheaval in labor markets and consumer behavior. Citing James Bridle's "New Dark Age," Neuvonen observed that each new layer of technology, rather than making the future more legible, tends to make it less predictable, compounding uncertainty instead of resolving it.
Facing this uncertainty, Neuvonen proposed backcasting as a working method: rather than forecasting forward from present trends, planners should define a range of desirable futures and then work backward to trace plausible pathways from those futures to the present. He paired this with a warning about "cruel optimism," a concept from future studies describing how long-term transition narratives keep promising breakthroughs that always remain two steps ahead, so that waiting itself becomes a durable condition rather than a bridge to change. The corrective, he suggested, is not to abandon positive future-orientation but to be honest about the trap of futurelessness that results when societies simply extrapolate dominant, unexamined narratives forward.
The panel discussion that followed pushed on these themes from different angles. One panelist, working on children's mobility and everyday digital tools, argued that planning is already saturated with data and that the real question is not the volume of information available but the values assigned to it — proposing an "ethics of care," drawn from feminist theory, as a planning principle in its own right: who is cared for by a given dataset, and whose safety or mobility gets counted, are political choices embedded in supposedly neutral technical systems. A second panelist, reflecting on an earlier keynote about data and AI in planning, argued that the deeper risk is not that AI becomes an autonomous machine ruling over human decisions, but that constant exposure to coded systems — smartwatches, algorithmic prompts, engineered interfaces — makes people behave more like machines themselves. This raised what the panelist called the fundamental question of whether planning can still enable authentic human experience, or whether it will instead entrench a coded, instrumentalized way of living.
A third panelist examined competing political imaginaries of climate action, contrasting a "net zero" framing that relies on lifestyle and cultural change with a more Promethean, technology-led vision built around carbon capture and nuclear power — noting that both provoke backlash when they fail to resonate with the public, which suggested to the panel that plurality of imaginaries matters less than whether any given imaginary can gain genuine social traction. Framing his own intervention around the question "is planning worth doing," one panelist echoed the existential register of Camus's opening question about whether life is worth living, arguing that planning survives such doubts because it is inherently human: to look ahead, to reflect on the world, and to try to anticipate what cannot fully be known is simply part of human nature, and so, in his words, humanity cannot stop planning.
The most fundamental question for planning is: is it worth planning? ... I think plan is inherently human — we continue planning because it's in our nature, the nature to plan, to be sentient beings, thinking about the world, about the future.
The session closed on a note that tied embodiment back to imagination: one panelist, drawing on her work on bodies and political subjectivity, suggested that imaginaries do not change only through discourse but through the lived, collective performativity of bodies acting together in public space — a reminder that, however digital the tools of planning become, the transitions under discussion are ultimately experienced and contested by people, not only by data and algorithms.
③ Planning for Moving Targets — The New Geo-Cortex (Bayırbağ, METU)
I'm not here to teach anything, but it's going to be a kind of invitation to think together, to reflect on things together. And often this is going to be a group therapy session.
Bayırbağ's title, "The New Geo-Cortex of Planning: Globalization 2.0, Emergency Diagnostics and Transformational Planning," signaled the double sense in which he wanted the audience to understand "geo." The first is the familiar geopolitical sense of international relations; the second, more central to his argument, is the political constitution of spatial reality itself — the claim that space is not a neutral backdrop to planning but is actively produced through political and institutional processes. He laid out an itinerary that moved from the conceptual roots of planning, to why planning is inescapably spatial, to the geopolitics of the present transformation, and finally to what he called the death — or perhaps rebirth — of the planner in an age of globalization 2.0.
The keynote's first substantive claim was that planning is, at root, a psychological and cognitive necessity. Human beings, he argued, cannot function without reducing uncertainty about the future; without some provisional mastery over what is to come, anxiety and paralysis follow. Planning is the discipline that converts diffuse anxiety about the future into workable projections and, at times, into utopian imaginaries that must then be translated into realistic, actionable proposals. Because human cognition itself works by simplifying and patterning complexity — our brains, as he put it, are networks that need to compress the world into manageable categories — planning becomes the professional extension of this basic cognitive operation: abstracting and reducing complexity so that action becomes possible.
From this psychological necessity, Bayırbağ moved to planning as an operational and technical necessity. Operationally, planning is fundamentally about problem-solving, decision-making, and — crucially — political coordination across multiple actors and levels of authority; it is, in his words, a tool for pulling multiple strings at once. Technically, planning depends on methods of calculation, measurement, and representation; planners are, in effect, algorithm designers who translate spatial thinking into scalable, visualizable, and actionable form before any physical space is actually designed. These three necessities — psychological, operational, technical — together explain why planning as an activity persists even as its objects and instruments are transformed almost beyond recognition.
He then argued that planning is inherently spatial and political for a structural reason: the authorities and decision-makers who prepare plans are themselves geopolitical and territorial entities, politically constituted and geographically bounded, and their interactions with one another are likewise geographically structured. It follows that the spatial and conceptual categories planners use cannot be timeless or neutral — they must be continuously updated to reflect the actual geographical and political transformations under way. This is the pivot to his central diagnosis: today's transformations have made the objects of planning intervention increasingly mobile. Problems, populations, information, and services no longer sit still within the fixed administrative jurisdictions that classical planning assumes; they travel. Planning organized around fixed jurisdictional boundaries is, in his phrase, effectively disabled when the targets it is meant to address are moving targets.
Our objects of intervention are moving — they are not fixed in space. We are no longer working with fixed jurisdictions; fixed jurisdictions are not going to work. The problems are moving people, moving information, moving services, moving problems, and so on.
This does not mean, Bayırbağ was careful to clarify, that the nation-state disappears. Rather, the nation-state is reorganized and absorbed into what he called a governance matrix — a dense, multi-scalar web of connections in which central governments remain active but are only one node among many, operating alongside supranational bodies such as the European Union, transnational corporate networks, and digital-capitalist infrastructures that increasingly set the terms of "globalization 2.0." What actually runs this matrix day to day, he argued, are largely informal networks and the individuals he termed network managers or network administrators: actors whose power derives not from formal jurisdiction but from their position of centrality within these hidden, often deliberately non-transparent networks.
Pressed in the discussion period to say who holds power within this matrix and how it might be democratized, Bayırbağ offered one of the keynote's sharpest formulations: the more central an actor becomes within the network, the more other governments and institutions come to depend on that actor — a dynamic that fosters strongman rule and one-person governance rather than distributed authority. Networks, he insisted, do not democratize themselves; if planners want a say in how these matrices are shaped, they must be organized enough to enter the network and reshape it from within, since no external appeal to fairness will do that work for them. He closed by turning the same demand for organized, collective agency back onto the audience, reiterating that this reckoning with a discipline built for fixed jurisdictions but now confronting moving targets was, in the end, the group-therapy exercise he had promised at the outset.
The more the network administrator tries to expand the center of the network, the more others become dependent on that administrator — that's why this is the world of, quote-unquote, strong leaders. This network will not allow itself to be democratized; you must be very well organized if you want to enter it, or reshape it.
What the three keynotes leave for Seoul
Heard back to back, the three keynotes rhymed. LIU Jian read planning as something that evolves with each political and economic era, always tasked with ‘defining and solving problems’ in the public interest. The Neuvonen panel insisted that the digital and green transition must be steered by values and justice, not by the technology itself. Bayırbağ argued that fixed administrative jurisdictions can no longer hold problems that have become moving targets, and called for planners organized enough to enter and reshape the networks that now govern.
For Seoul the through-line is direct. As the city pushes the digital transformation of its urban-planning information systems and builds data- and AI-based planning support, the question is not efficiency alone but how to keep equity, deliberation, and human judgment inside the design — and how to plan across boundaries for populations, services, and risks that no longer sit still. The three keynotes returned that question to the discipline as a whole: whether planning can still make a just and livable world.
This account complements the series' Summary ② and the detailed streaming records; here the emphasis is on the arguments as delivered in the hall, reconstructed from the on-site recording.