'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.