This paper discusses the ethical issues in urban planning in general and smart city planning in particular from the perspective of epistemology. Although the overall objective of urban planning is for human good, planners in practice often face difficult choices between alternatives that involve winners and losers. Some ethical principles should be applied to minimize the loss of individuals or groups as much as possible. We should recognize from the epistemological perspective that planners’ lack of sympathy, limits of planning knowledge, and planning fallacies could result in unintended and undesirable consequences. The problem is especially conspicuous in the planning and implementation of smart cities. This paper suggests that planners should strengthen the sense of sympathy based on communicative rationality, and safeguard policies should be adopted in the urban planning system to ensure that the interests of disadvantaged groups are protected, and the ethics of urban planning are upheld. Urban planning requires reason, sensibility, communicative rationality, and safeguard policies.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, rapid development of transportation, information, energy, and other infrastructure networks, coupled with the proliferation of intelligent technologies, have radically reconfigured urban-rural development, pushing it beyond conventional spatial boundaries. Urbanization processes are now intricately linked to deserts, rainforests, oceans, and even deep-sea and outer-space domains. These distant realms actively participate in urbanization through global material and energy cycles, thereby co-shaping developmental pathways. This vast spatial expansion has introduced unprecedented complexity into the scales, dimensions, and socio-spatial dynamics of urban-rural systems, challenging the foundations of existing theoretical frameworks and posing significant challenges to their contemporary interpretation. Through a systematic examination of the literature, this paper argues that urban-rural sociospatial theory needs to broaden its focus along three key dimensions: the reconceptualization of urban-rural relations, the underlying logic of socio-spatial dynamics, and the constitutive elements of socio-spatial interactions. Building on this analysis, this paper proposes an integrated ‘Social-Spatial-Ecological’theoretical framework, which aims to characterize contemporary urban-rural socio-spatial evolution, advance theoretical discourse, and deepen the understanding of the foundational logic of urban-rural development.

This paper focuses on the goal of “enhancing urban-rural linkages to promote sustainable urbanization” as set out in the global 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda, as well as the associated global practices. UN-Habitat’s Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles provides a normative framework and practical guidance for action, emphasizing new planning methods to create economic, social, and environmental opportunities that meet the needs of both urban and rural residents, thereby achieving a more inclusive and equitable new pattern of sustainable urban-rural development. In the case countries, the common vision for urban and rural areas is to “achieve balanced urban-rural development”, leading to the formulation of integrated comprehensive plans that promote inclusive development. However, the strategies and emphases on urban-rural linkages vary across regions: African cases primarily enhance urban-rural linkages through infrastructure development; European cases feature relatively systematic governance systems and treat rural revitalization as a routine indicator; cases in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean regions are gradually strengthening economic, social, cultural, and environmental interactions between rural and urban areas, yet mechanisms to facilitate factor flows remain to be further improved. Overall, practices in different countries are committed to adopting inclusive and participatory governance approaches, building multi-stakeholder engagement to establish balanced urban-rural collaborative relationships. Studying how global cases promote two-way flows of population, products, services, and information between urban and rural areas through planning governance is of great significance for China to build a new development paradigm of urban-rural integration.

This paper takes Germany as a case study to systematically analyse the evolution of urban-rural socio-spatial relations and their regulatory mechanisms since the beginning of the 20th century. Driven by industrialization and urbanization, the urban-rural relationship in Germany has undergone profound transformations in both form and function, showing characteristics of intertwined factors and spatial hybridity, while also exhibiting a clear trend of socio-spatial polarization. However, compared with most European countries, Germany’s urban-rural disparities have remained at a relatively low level overall. This is closely linked to its polycentric spatial structure and its long-standing policy orientation of “ensuring equivalentliving conditions.” The paper analyses this issue from two perspectives: regional planning and practical projects. On the one hand, regional planning, by constructing a multi-level centre system and spatial development frameworks, provides institutional support for balanced urban-rural development, although its regulatory effect has certain limitations. On the other hand, in recent years, rural revitalization projects characterized by multi-level fiscal support, participation of socially innovative actors, and diverse implementation approaches have played a more direct role in narrowing the urban-rural gap. The study shows that Germany, by combining policy-guided principles with coordinated actions among multiple stakeholders, has formed a development pathway that offers valuable insights for achieving balance in urban-rural socio-spatial relations.