Forms in planning often do not match the forms of cities. This is important because the experience and functionings of cities are given by certain forms and not by others. In particular we are concerned here with the fact planning and design thinking often assumes a nested hierarchy of communities and spaces while the real forms of cities suggest a different diagram of how hierarchies are formed and sustained as active spaces. We ask the question what kind of forms human action and urban activity entail, and begin to answer this with a view taken from hermeneutical phenomenology that finds these mediated by technologies in such a way that what acts is the human?technology network rather than the human in a polar relation with a resistant ‘environment’. ‘Environments’ are, it is suggested, ‘technological spaces’ constructed in networks and to normative forms and scales like ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘city’. We review previous work on the role of the supergrid in constructing these forms in a process of historical development in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam infrastructure has been systematised to create networks of places in neighbourhoods, in cities (neighbourhoods and other city?scale things), and in metropolitan regions (cities and other metropolitan scaled things). This is a level of ‘planning’ that concerns normative assumptions and exists outside of the explicit concerns of planning while affecting all planning decisions at the level of sense. We conclude there is a different ‘diagram’ of urban space, consisting of three grids superimposed on each other, each of which produces a different normative element: neighbourhood, city and metropolitan region; each of which exists in part?whole relations with the others. We use this model to investigate the form of the city of Jinan in China, asking about its relevance and how we can use it to promote planning for an active public space in new towns in Jinan. Chinese planning assumes a particular form of the city and we contrast this with the actuality of activity patterns in Jinan and their historical formation. We ask how planning form needs to be translated here into urban form in order to promote public space activity in the new towns proposed and make some guidelines and suggestions for planners on how we can begin to do this. The question of why a model derived in European conditions may help us in China may be answered by the fact that both were subject of urbanisation under conditions of industrialisation and both are undergoing transformation under conditions of metropolitanisation. There is an open question still concerning Chinese ‘neighbourhoods’ and their definition.