Volatile urbanism: Rethinking planning beyond the stability premise

Contemporary land use policy rests on a foundational and insufficiently examined premise that the exogenous operating environment of cities will remain within historically derived parameters adequate for extrapolative planning. This paper terms that premise the stability premise and argues that its structural dissolution constitutes not a series of correctable policy failures but a fundamental reconfiguration in the conditions under which urban governance operates. The concept of Volatile Urbanismis introduced to theorise that transformation: defined as the structural condition produced when disruptions to urban operating systems arrive with a velocity, simultaneity, and cross-systemic compounding that systematically exceeds the adaptive capacity of the institutions governing those cities. Three constitutive properties are identified and theorised: (i) transmission without proximity, (ii) compounding rather than sequential disruption, and (iii) institutional lag as the primary vulnerability mechanism, with implications for urban finance, infrastructure insurance, public health systems, and municipal fiscal governance. The framework is distinguished from the cognate concepts of fragility, vulnerability, and resilience, including its most sophisticated reformulations through transformative and evolutionary resilience theory, against which it offers a theoretically bounded contribution focused on the velocity-institution mismatch as a distinct governance failure mode. Specific implications are developed for zoning and land classification, infrastructure investment appraisal, development planning, and urban finance. The paper argues that land use policy is both the domain in which the stability premise is most durably encoded and the most consequential site for its reformulation. The framework arrives at a moment when the 2026 Strait of Hormuz closure, the 2023–2024 Red Sea shipping crisis, and the compound urban consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have made the theoretical inadequacy of existing frameworks empirically evident.