Abstract
Complexity seems to be a very familiar notion for urban planners. Yet the will to master the variety of interests, needs, and constraints that characterize strategic efforts to influence land use structures, urban design, and socioeconomic structures in cities has demonstrated the self-confidence of the planning profession in efficient and just ways. The communicative turn in planning and its related paradigm shift have shattered this self-perception of the planning profession and provided ways to deal with the pitfalls of uncertainty and bounded rationality, though. With a dramatic increase in data-processing capacity and inventive approaches by other disciplines in dealing with complexity, one can notice attempts by planning theorists and practitioners to find new ways of dealing with the unresolved issue of coping with “wicked problems” satisfactorily. The edited volume by Gert de Roo and Elisabete A. Silva, a product of the Working Group on Complexity and Planning established in 2005 within the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), stands in this line of thought although it does not even mention the notion of “wicked problems” explicitly. It contains an introduction and sixteen chapters by mostly European authors mainly based in the United Kingdom.
The chapters can roughly be separated into four groups. The first group of essays deals with the concept of complexity, its transdisciplinary nature, the constitution of modern societies and decision making in the public domain, and the relevance of complexity theory for planning and spatial development. In this context, the authors discuss the role of time and change (Celino and Concilio) and the related consequences for uncertainty of predictions concerning the future (de Roo), conceptualizations of space (Hagens), or the procedural nature of planning and the respective consequences for the development of tangible solutions for problems with a spatial focus (Grunau and Schönwandt).
The second group of essays covers different aspects of complexity in a look at the nature of planning procedures in more detail. Here, plausible links are built up to the paradigm of collaborative planning, experimental policy making borrowed from evolutionary economics (Bertolini), other fields of economics (Webster), or the theory of complex adaptive systems (Huys and van Gils) to cope with irreducible uncertainty or emergent social order. However, despite the sophisticated perspective some of the essays are taking, the reader does not gain a clear picture of how complexity theory may fertilize down-to-earth debates in the respective fields. What seems to make it even more challenging is the fact that although many of the conclusions drawn by the chapters in the book are valid, the way planning is criticized for its inherent technocratic rationalities suggests that the authors do not always take the state of the art in collaborative planning or other fields of planning theory seriously.
The third group looks at typical planning tasks that can be associated with complexity that may be mastered more easily with the help of contemporary methodologies tailored for the processing of great amounts of data. Not coincidentally, some of the essays discuss new approaches in simulation methods that may be helpful for urban planning. Although the simulation methods and tools are explained in some detail, they are by no means able to delve deeply enough into this specialized field that stands somewhat isolated from the rest of the book. Thus, one may doubt that simulation may make significant contributions to predicting possible futures or understanding relevant phenomena of urban life. Substantial progress in theory building and useful guidance for planning practice or only theoretical reflections on it are completely missing. The authors seem lost in a distant world that fascinates them but leave the rest of the community behind (Silva on cellular automata, Avineri on fractal traffic networks, Tippett on participatory ecological design). One major exception is the essay by Batty that demonstrates convincingly how simulation methods can be used as supportive heuristic tools for a reflection on planning problems.
Finally, the fourth group presents case studies of planning practice that are interpreted with the help of the complexity framework or that are related to it. While they may be interesting or even original and instructive as case studies in themselves, they appear to be detached from the remainder of the book. It may be worth studying the plan for a relocation of the heritage center of the mining town of Kiruna in northern Sweden (Nilsson), the possible ways to model travelers’ behavior in promoting car sharing (Sunitiyoso, Avineri, and Chatterjee), or the conflict between heritage and neoliberal discourses on brownfield redevelopment (Karadimitriou, Doak, and Cidre). However, the conclusions by the respective authors might be of greater interest for a specialized audience in other fields of planning theory. The relation to the theoretical context of this book seems hardly motivated.
Some of the essays, such as the one by Grunau and Schönwandt on general procedural approaches for dealing with complex decision making or the one by Van Wezemael on the possible contribution by an assemblage theory approach toward understanding urban governance seem worth reading for a good orientation in the field and even inspiring in parts. However, there is only one single chapter in the book that stands out: The chapter by Michael Batty on complexity in city systems really grasps the key issues of the book and gives a fascinating introduction into the potential power of complexity theory. It makes clear that simulation and modeling has gone far beyond the simplistic cybernetic thinking introduced in planning a few decades ago.
Unfortunately, the remainder of the book hardly offers theoretical thoughts that go further than vague concepts, unfulfilled promises, and ambiguous transdisciplinary perspectives backed only with the help of associations. Important links to the existing knowledge in related fields of planning theory are neglected. Examples of these works are the nature of “wicked problems” introduced by Rittel and Webber (1973), major strands of systems theory in the tradition of Luhmann (1995) or Willke (1995), and the debate on urban governance and power relations in complex planning processes and their consequences (Flyvbjerg 1998). Incorporating these discussions would have been illuminating in chiseling the contours of a new avenue for interdisciplinary research. A possible alternative to looking beyond the worn-out paths of traditional planning theory and to incorporating inspiration from other disciplines takes the reader onto a wide and interesting yet eclectic trip into the world of economics, the social sciences, and natural sciences. However, this alternative has already turned out to be less fruitful a few years ago when the ideas of chaos theory were imported into planning theory. This import unfortunately produced too many narcissistic approaches and too little substantial results, and one hopes that the same will not happen to complexity theory in planning in general and the disappointing read A Planner’s Encounter with Complexity in particular.