Die Welt wird zur Stadt

This paper offers an alternative reading of the claim that the world is turning urban, treating it as a sign of a deeper shift in how the urban is conceived, governed, and imagined, beyond spatial or demographic accounts.As the world turns urban describes processes shaped by political forces and forms of knowledge across overlapping arenas and highlights the entanglement of social, technical, and political practices through which the urban emerges as an epistemic field.This perspective raises questions of who knows, represents, and transforms the city, and how regimes of knowledge produce partially converging, constantly reconfiguring urban realities. Planning is embedded in this transformation, widening its frame from shaping physical space to mediating between algorithmic models, institutional routines, and collective imaginaries. The global city is thus continuously enacted through translation, simulation, and affective infrastructures. The task is to rethink planning as a reflexive and situated practice that interrogates its epistemic conditions within shifting knowledge orders and urban futures discourse.