Featured article from Global Newsletter May 2026
Written by Marta Lora-Tamayo Vallvé. Professor of Administrative Law, UNED. Department of Administrative Law. Director of the UNED-Lincoln Institute Chair on Land Policy
Urban planning is a key component of social policy and plays a very important role in social well- being. How is urban governance changing? Urban governance is currently undergoing a double transformation. On the one hand, traditional regulatory and zoning-based planning systems are increasingly complemented—and in some respects displaced—by strategic, non-binding and process- oriented instruments, commonly referred to as “agendas”. On the other hand, public decision-making is being reshaped by digitalisation, big data and artificial intelligence, giving rise to new forms of evidence-based, platform-mediated and algorithmically supported governance. These two developments are not independent. Together, they are redefining how public authorities plan, govern and legitimise interventions in the territory, and how citizens participate in the construction of urban futures.
The emergence of the New Urban Agenda (2016), the Urban Agenda for the European Union, the Territorial Agenda 2030 and, at national level, the Spanish Urban Agenda, illustrates a broader transformation in the legal and institutional architecture of spatial governance. These instruments do not merely set policy goals; they institutionalise participation as a core organising principle of urban governance, linking the right to the city, sustainable development and multilevel coordination with deliberative, inclusive and knowledge-based decision-making processes.
At the same time, cities are becoming laboratories of algorithmic governance. Smart city platforms, digital twins, predictive analytics and AI-based decision-support systems increasingly inform urban planning, mobility management, environmental regulation and public service provision. While these technologies promise efficiency, precision and anticipatory capacity, they also risk reintroducing technocratic logics under the guise of objectivity, potentially weakening transparency, accountability and meaningful citizen participation.
The concept of agendisation refers to the progressive replacement—or, more accurately, the strategic reconfiguration—of traditional, hierarchical and norm-centred planning instruments by soft-law frameworks that articulate shared objectives, policy priorities and implementation pathways across multiple levels of government. Rather than operating through binding zoning rules or detailed regulatory commands, agendas function as strategic, integrative and process-oriented instruments. They establish a common language, a set of guiding principles and a methodology for coordinated action, while leaving room for contextual adaptation and institutional learning.
The agenda-based turn in urban governance provides a normative and institutional bridge between classical planning law and emerging forms of AI-assisted decision-making. By embedding participation, multilevel coordination and strategic vision into soft-law frameworks, territorial agendisation anticipates key safeguards required for democratic governance in the digital era. It offers a model in which artificial intelligence can support, rather than replace, collective deliberation, and where data-driven tools are subordinated to human-centred, rights-based and participatory principles.
Agendisation has progressively reconfigured the legal and institutional architecture of spatial governance. Through soft-law instruments such as the New Urban Agenda, the European Urban and Territorial Agendas and the Spanish Urban Agenda, participation has moved from a peripheral procedural guarantee to a structural principle of policy design, implementation and evaluation. These agendas have institutionalised a model of governance based on strategic vision, multilevel coordination, evidence-based reasoning and, above all, co-production with citizens and stakeholders. In doing so, they have anticipated many of the normative and procedural requirements that are now emerging as essential in the context of algorithmic governance.
Artificial intelligence and digital platforms amplify both the possibilities and the risks inherent in this transformation. On the one hand, they enable unprecedented capacities for territorial diagnosis, scenario modelling, impact assessment and real-time monitoring, potentially strengthening collective intelligence and the quality of public decision-making. On the other hand, they introduce new forms of opacity, concentration of epistemic power and technocratic displacement that may undermine democratic deliberation and accountability if left unchecked.
The core argument advanced here is that agenda-based, participatory and multilevel governance provides a crucial institutional and legal scaffold for ensuring that AI becomes an instrument of democratic empowerment rather than a vector of depoliticisation. By embedding participation across the entire policy cycle, articulating evidence with deliberation, and linking local knowledge with strategic coordination at higher levels, territorial agendisation offers a model of human-centred algorithmic governance. In this model, artificial intelligence supports, but does not replace, political judgment, legal responsibility and civic deliberation.
From a legal perspective, this entails a re-interpretation of classical principles of administrative and planning law—transparency, due process, reason-giving, accountability and judicial review—in light of algorithmic mediation. Participation must be guaranteed not only at the level of final decisions, but also in the construction of data infrastructures, indicators and predictive models. The right to the city, re-conceptualised through the New Urban Agenda and its European and national derivatives, thus acquires a new dimension: the right to participate in the governance of socio-technical systems that shape urban life.
Ultimately, territorial agendisation can be understood as a form of democratic constitutionalism of urban governance in the making. Through soft law, strategic planning and participatory architectures, it establishes the normative conditions under which the transition towards AI-assisted cities can remain anchored in fundamental rights, social inclusion and collective self-government. The challenge for the coming years will be to consolidate this framework, ensuring that the digital transformation of public administration and urban planning strengthens, rather than erodes, the democratic foundations of spatial decision-making.
In this sense, the convergence of agendas, participation and artificial intelligence does not signal the end of planning law or public deliberation. On the contrary, it calls for their renewal: a move towards a multilevel, participatory and technologically informed model of governance in which cities are not merely managed by algorithms, but collectively governed by informed, empowered and legally protected urban citizens.
