The dilemmas of valuation

Minjee Kim's paper makes a long-overdue contribution to the debate on the relationship between the fields of planning and real estate valuation (Kim, 2026).The author outlines a clear agenda for how planners can become more actively engaged in improving project appraisal, with the aim of reducing environmental injustice and, in particular, social inequality.She combines a critical conceptual reflection on prevailing evaluation methods-largely grounded in discounted cash flow analysis-with practical proposals for strengthening planning practice.In doing so, the paper not only examines the analytical foundations of value and valuation, and their implications for assessing the broader social and sustainability impacts of real estate projects but also offers concrete examples and suggestions for how planners might seek to transform the praxis of real estate valuation.In this comment, I develop a sympathetic critique organized around four observations.First, the paper adopts a somewhat dichotomous stylization of valuation practices, in which standard financial discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques and cost-benefit analysis are portrayed as representing an orthodox, neoclassically inspired "Net Present Exchange Value" (NPEV) approach, in contrast to a proposed alternative method structured around the concept of Net Present Social Value (NPSV).As commonly practiced, cost benefit analysis has indeed contributed to the consolidation of a technocratic and utilitarian planning project.As the author argues, the method is used by the elites to justify urban subsidies and/or discourses in urban policymaking.Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that many of the issues discussed and proposals advanced in the paper have long been part of successive rounds of conceptual and practice-oriented debates within the cost benefit literature, albeit articulated through a different epistemic framework, grammar, and vocabulary.In this respect, the paper is marked by a notable silence on cost benefit analysis itself-its theoretical foundations in welfare economics and its historical influence on Benthamite-utilitarian planning