A Planner's Encounter with Complexity

Elisabete A. Silva, Gert de Roo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317187080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Spatial planning is about dealing with our 'everyday' environment. In A Planner's Encounter with Complexity we present various understandings of complexity and how the environment is considered accordingly. One of these considerations is the environment as subject to processes of continuous change, being either progressive or destructive, evolving non-linearly and alternating between stable and dynamic periods. If the environment that is subject to change is adaptive, self-organizing, robust and flexible in relation to this change, a process of evolution and co-evolution can be expected. This understanding of an evolving environment is not mainstream to every planner. However, in A Planner's Encounter with Complexity, we argue that environments confronted with discontinuous, non-linear evolving processes might be more real than the idea that an environment is simply a planner's creation. Above all, we argue that recognizing the 'complexity' of our environment offers an entirely new perspective on our world and our environment, on planning theory and practice, and on the raison d'être of the planners that we are. A Planner's Encounter with Complexity is organized into 17 chapters. It begins with the interplay of planning and complexity from the perspective of contemporary planning theory. It continues by critically assessing planning theory and practice in the light of the interdisciplinary debate regarding complexity thinking. As the book progresses, it positions itself ever closer to the perspective of complexity thinking, looking at the planning discipline 'from the outside in', clarifying the facets of complexity and its importance in planning. Finally, conceptual and theoretical developments towards more applied examples are identified in order to see the interplay of planning and complexity in practice. This book emphasizes the importance of complexity in planning, clarifies many of the concepts and theories, presents examples on planning and complexity, and proposes new ideas and methods for planning.

Chapter 1
Planning and Complexity: An Introduction

Gert de Roo¹

Planners have multiple perceptions of the notion of ‘complexity’ and how it should be considered within the planning environment. Complexity is a term that is used and misused in various ways: ‘It is too complex to manage’ and ‘the complexity is rather disastrous’, are statements with which most of us have been confronted. Put like this, the message is an effective yet destructive way of addressing undesirable situations, expressing frustration and a disguise perhaps for a lack of interest in taking appropriate action.

The planning community has by and large ignored a much wider debate in academia concerning complexity in relation to notions of co-evolving and self-organising realities and complex systems which are adaptive and emergent. Between these two opposing understandings and interpretations of complexity is a world awaiting discovery, in which complexity has a positive role to play in planning.

This introductory chapter attempts to address various interpretations of complexity within planning, producing a range of considerations, some of which will be addressed more substantially in later chapters. These chapters will clarify the reasoning, restrictions, consequences and, above all, opportunities available to us as planners if we are willing to remain open to the various debates concerning complexity and planning. Therefore this book is indeed A Planner’s Encounter with Complexity.

1.1 The fuzzy understanding of complexity

Complexity and planning – how incompatible they seem. Some consider that complexity refers to a qualification of a state of affairs. While planning refers to a rational process which guides actions from an existing situation towards an envisaged future situation. In relation to planning, others hold an opposing view, finding little reference within the theoretical debate on planning that incorporates the temporal aspects of the planning process (De Roo, Chapter 2). There are also alternative views on complexity.

One arises from the interdisciplinary academic debate concerning theories of complexity and so-called ‘complexity thinking’. Here complexity is considered as being very much time-oriented and representing processes ‘out of balance’, with realities emerging at the interface of order and chaos (Waldrop, 1993). As such, complexity represents dynamic realities and non-linear behaviour. These realities and this behaviour have not yet found common ground within the planning community.

Several concepts lying at the heart of planning are decidedly fuzzy in nature, where fuzziness refers to multivalence, or ‘vagueness’ as Bertrand Russell called it (Kosko, 1993). It contradicts conceptions of a ‘true or false’ nature (Lootsma, 1997, p. 5), pointing instead to the shades of grey that can be found between such black and white oppositions. Fuzzy notions are multivalent in nature, with the principle conception of this being that this can be ‘most easily grasped if one has in mind that […] one does not directly meet sets with a crisp “borderline”…’ (Bandemer and Gottwald, 1995). The test is an easy one: ask any group of students to define ‘complexity’, or even better to define ‘sustainability’ as students have grown up with an emerging sustainability discourse. The definitions they arrive at will undoubtedly include opposing perceptions. In planning there are various notions and concepts that are fuzzy by nature, such as sustainability and liveability, urban and rural, and the ‘communicative’ nature of contemporary planning. Many people have defined these conceptual notions, interpreting them in a host of different ways. Clearly, this diversity of interpretation is also the case for ‘complexity’.

In the case of most planners, complexity is little more than an adverb which has not been given much thought. Nevertheless within the planning community there is a growing understanding of the importance of the conceptual side of complexity. Complexity and how it might work as a concept within planning is, however, not yet well understood and has been given a variety of meanings. Thus, for many planners, ‘complexity’ is indeed a fuzzy concept. However, unlike ‘sustainability’, for example, it has particular theoretical implications. While the fuzziness of ‘sustainability’ affects actions and behaviour in planning, ‘complexity’ influences our understanding of planning. As such, it is necessary to search for the philosophical and theoretical principles of complexity. In doing so, we also need to unravel the different discourses, attitudes and prejudices associated with the notion of complexity within the planning debate.

This is precisely what we have set out to do in this book. Without attempting to be exhaustive (an impossible undertaking in any case), we have endeavoured to be open-minded in considering the multiple interpretations of complexity, both within and outside the field of planning. We have done so by allowing different authors to consciously engage with the concept of complexity and thus have their say. They share with us their interpretation of the concept and explain how they have grappled with it.

In A Planner’s Encounter with Complexity we also seek to alert planners to a notable theoretical development concerning the term ‘complexity’. Linked to the notion of complex systems, this development parallels that of systems theory in the 1950s and 1960s. However, it has implications for our understanding of reality that extend far beyond the significance that systems theory had for academic thinking and practice. Many academic disciplines take the theoretical side of complexity extremely seriously. Despite this, planners have long overlooked the theoretical implications of complexity and the affects of associated complex systems. However, the broad academic discussion of this subject – and this is the position adopted in this book – can no longer be ignored.

1.2 Planners’ first struggles with complexity

Many planners view complexity as a qualification of and confrontation with reality, involving a complex situation, a complex constellation of interests or a complex process. They see complex interrelationships, a coherence that is difficult to predict and a potentially unmanageable situation that might prove too much for those involved (requiring them to be on the alert, aware of a range of possible eventualities). Most of all, the idea of complexity raises the threat of a barrier, an obstacle to a satisfactory resolution. Viewed in this light, complexity has a distinctly negative connotation, with many planning practitioners signalling to their peers that they feel their backs to the wall as things become ‘far too complex’. From a practical and theoretical perspective this attitude is rather unsatisfactory.

There is more to complexity, however. And some of us have taken the challenge to reflect upon it. Particularly interesting is the conceptualisation of complexity which takes place in various ways within the work and ideas of planners. Some might consider the enormous variety of these conceptualisations to be unsatisfactory. However, the variety of considerations constitutes a first step in structuring a disciplinary debate on complexity and planning. This debate is unavoidable and sooner or later it will have to be addressed in the field of planning, given the rapid developments in the discussion of the issue of complexity within other disciplines. Therefore, we take as a starting point the question of how complexity as a concept is currently interpreted within planning, ending in Section 1.6 with planners’ understanding of the concept of ‘complex systems’, an emerging understanding from outside planning, and how this might influence the planning discipline.

Some consider complexity to be synonymous with complicatedness, while others point out the fundamental differences between the two. Nilsson, in Chapter 4, takes the position that complicated matters should be regarded as complex in cases where the circumstances involve unbalanced power relationships. She demonstrates her argument with the example of the wholesale relocation of the mining town of Kiruna in Northern Sweden. Here, unbalanced power relationships not only created a suboptimum arena for decision making, but also created uncertainties about possible transformations within and between coalitions.

Some argue that it is our contextual environment – society in all its forms – that is becoming more and more complex, and that we must adjust our planning actions and behaviour accordingly. Others believe that reality is always complex, but that this is something we have thus far ignored or tried to avoid in our thoughts and actions. According to Berting (1996, p. 24), ‘Social reality is always extremely complex and we can observe, somewhat ironically, that complexity in itself is not the problem, but acting on the basis of simplifications of the social reality’.

The idea of complexity as a barrier to further development is evident within the theoretical debate on planning. This concerns, first and foremost, the development of the debate itself. Although planners in the late 1950s embraced ‘rational choice’ as the essence of what planning should be about, confrontation with a stubborn (or ‘complex’) reality put this assumption severely to the test. This resulted in the first ‘theoretical’ crisis in planning, where the conditions under which ‘rational choice’ could operate effectively were shown to be limited (that is, ‘bounded and incremental’) because reality was simply too complex for the method proposed. In the late 1980s, theoreticians again pointed to a crisis facing the planning theory debate (Alexander, 1984; Poulton, 1991). Solutions arising from discussions about bounded rationality, muddling through and incrementalism had also failed to offer sufficient solace. Planners were ready to accept a paradigm shift: the communicative turn to planning.

Not surprisingly, some point to the developments in planning theory considering these to be a response to the growing complexity within planning. Within the theoretical debate there has been a move away from the rational choice model and its charming simplicity, to bounded rationality and scenario planning, and from there towards the communicative side of planning. Some say this is a process of developing an awareness of the limitations of certainty. In other words, the successive crises in planning have basically been about coping with growing complexity, accepting uncertainty and finding alternative ways of dealing with these issues.

In the late 1980s, the neo-Marxist school within sociology confronted planning theory, revealing it to have too narrow a perspective on reality. The ideas of great philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault and Habermas were also discovered, each of whom pointed out the limitations of an object-oriented approach. Habermas claimed ‘that, far from giving up on reason as an informing principle for contemporary societies, we should shift perspective from an individualised, subject-object conception of reason, to reasoning formed within inter-subjective communication’ (Habermas, 1987). In other words, along with an orientation to the object and the associated facts, intersubjective interactions and their resulting ideas should be equally important for our conception of reality and in planning practice.

Even more importantly, planning constellations are now increasingly made up of a multitude of actors with different interests and concerns. Often these ‘complex’ situations have proven to be much more relevant for planning practice than a factual analysis of physical reality, hence a shift in focus within planning theory and practice from technical rationality to communicative rationality. However, this shift is not without consequences: ‘Rationality seen from a communicative-intersubjective perspective is no longer a matter of definitions, proposals, plans, and scenarios as the starting points, but rather as the outcome of decision making processes. Naturally, the role of the planner will also shift accordingly, and focus will shift from object-oriented goals to optimising interaction and participation’ (De Roo, 2003, p. 114).

With the acceptance of a communicative rationality, all alternatives to the rational-choice model are in retrospect burdened with a political reality founded on power. Without question, planning thus becomes politicised, due to the idea that actors are more than objective factors, and as such are engaged in a game that is evident in planning practice. The sociological rules explaining practice with regard to intersubjective interaction are then captured within a rationality that we label ‘communicative’.

At the point to which the evolution of mainstream planning theory has brought us today, it is not surprising to find some who consider constellations of networks, communicative, collaborative and participative behaviour to be issues which are typical of so-called ‘complex decision making’ (Teisman, 1992; De Bruin and Ten Heuvelhof, 1991). Some argue there is still much to be done within this communicative reality. This could mean, for example, incorporating communicative and participative theories in line with Habermasian and Foucauldian understandings, addressing more than before issues such as values, ethics and gender, and progressing further into the fields of communicative action, story telling, discourse analysis and so on.

1.3 Planning, fixed-state relations and complexity

It would be far from correct to say that planning theory and practice, as well as its concepts, views and instruments, have entered their final stage. At present, in the early 21st century, there is once again talk of a crisis within planning. Contrary to the faith of some in the communicative and collaborative side of planning, the number of those who doubt this approach is still small but rapidly increasing. If indeed another crisis might be around the corner, it is interesting to consider the paths which are being proposed to avoid or overcome this particular crisis. Although some of these proposals are strongly embedded within contemporary planning theory (see for example Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 2002), the role of ‘complexity’ is hard to ignore.

Some have proposed complexity as the one denominator which gives meaning to various positions across the range from technical rationality to communicative rationality. In other words, depending on their position on the spectrum between both rationales, issues can be seen as either non-complex (simple, straightforward), complex, or highly complex (chaotic). According to the argument presented in Chapter 2 (De Roo), complexity seen from this particular point of view should be understood as a relative constitution, superimposed upon a ‘fixed-state reality’. Clearly, this positioning and its subsequent characterisation in terms of various ‘degrees of complexity’ will have consequences for the handling of the issue from a planning perspective (Christensen, 1985; De Roo, 2001/2003). On this basis, Chapter 2 draws two conclusions: first, complexity can indeed function as a criterion for decision making within contemporary planning, and second, contemporary planning is atemporal, with a focus on planning issues in a ‘fixed-state reality’. Within this frozen setting, the mode of ‘complexity’ is therefore also atemporal. De Roo argues in this chapter that this is in no way a negative judgement, as this understanding can be a logical stepping stone in planning for temporal, evolutionary and non-linear realities.

Others point to ‘the fuzzy middle’ between the two main discourses of technical rationality (assuming certainties and an ontological focus on maximising objectives) and communicative rationality (involving intrinsic uncertainties, which above all should lead to agreements through interaction, resulting to some degree in frameworks for practice, in ontological terms a process optimisation), where most ‘real life’ planning problems are to be found (De Roo and Porter, 2007, see also Chapter 2). The idea is that between the ideal worlds of technical and communicative rationality there is a reality in which not only object orientation or intersubjective interaction is meaningful, but where both need to be examined at the same time (see Figure 2.3). Is it perhaps here that we can identify processes of complexity emerging from a ‘fuzzy middle’, where ‘order’ (technical rationality) and ‘chaos’ (communicative rationality) meet? Or is this totally beside the point?

In addition to successive orientations towards the object and the intersubjective, so common within contemporary planning theory, Schönwandt points to the importance of a third orientation which focuses on the human being, the subject. Building on the work of the biologist Jacob von Uexküll, he considers that his ‘approach […] explicitly addresses not only the limitations placed on our perceptual abilities, but also the restrictions of our cognitive capacities and the limits of our ability to act’ (2008, p. 25). According to Schönwandt this way of thinking also allows us to avoid chaos, confusion, inefficiency and misinterpretations, although these matters are not seen as constraints (bounded ratio...