[Book Review:] Francesco Lo Piccolo and Thomas Huw (Eds.): Ethics and planning research surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Having approached this volume from a sceptical standpoint on ethics in planning, I have been favourably impressed by the reflections it prompts – although not to the effect of dropping my scepticism altogether. The strength of this volume lies in highlighting the relevance of the topic and the inevitability of taking position with regard to it. While directing attention to a range of ethical implications in planning, the volume focuses on a specific set of ethical issues concerning the role of planning in the production and management of knowledge. The starting point can be summarized as follows: since designing and conducting research involves assuming an explicit or implicit ethical standing towards our social world, planning researchers need to develop reflexivity and awareness – a meta-ethics, so to speak – of the ethical issues and dilemmas involved in their work. Neglecting the need for reflexive sensitivity on ethical issues is neither politically nor epistemologically innocent, and can be seen as contributing to the (re-)production of the very conditions that should challenge our ethical consciousness and our moral conduct as planners