Urban contingencies at work: The influence of planning doctrines, disciplines and practices on planning for urban sustainability

Cities worldwide are positioned at the forefront of sustainability problems and challenges that stem from contemporary crises, e.g., urban, social-environmental, climate, health and financial. These crises pose critical, urgent questions regarding how to plan for urban sustainability. As sustainability discourses increasingly shape urban policy agendas worldwide, urban planning – as a professional field of knowledge, policy and practice – must prioritise key considerations to address the unprecedented sustainability challenges of twenty-first-century cities. Against this backdrop, this positioning chapter develops an ‘urban contingency’ approach to planning for urban sustainability that consists of three contingencies of place (i.e., doctrines, disciplines, practices), which are grounded in situated governance configurations, contextualised histories, and planning cultures. The main argument of the chapter is that urban planning should prioritise reassembling established, place-specific urban configurations shaped by structural development factors, institutions and agencies rather than relying on the adoption and implementation of decontextualised, allegedly replicable urban policies and best practices