‘Care-full’ planning: Towards an ethics and politics of care in planning

This paper aims to reinscribe an ethics of care in planning through a conceptual framework which connects the ethics of being caring with the politics of practicing care . We argue that planning’s limited attention to care is an unfortunate legacy of positivist views and their alignment with rationalist moral theories in which care is demoted to the private-domestic sphere and ‘feminine’ emotions while justice is elevated to the public-political sphere and ‘masculine’ reason. The perceived universality, objectivity and rationality of justice seems to have eclipsed the particularity, subjectivity and relationality of care. We suggest that a moral vision is needed in planning that integrates care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds.