Complexity and Planning

Systems, Assemblages and Simulations

Gert de Roo, Jean Hillier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317162759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Complexity, complex systems and complexity theories are becoming increasingly important within a variety disciplines. While these issues are less well known within the discipline of spatial planning, there has been a recent growing awareness and interest. As planners grapple with how to consider the vagaries of the real world when putting together proposals for future development, they question how complexity, complex systems and complexity theories might prove useful with regard to spatial planning and the physical environment. This book provides a readable overview, presenting and relating a range of understandings and characteristics of complexity and complex systems as they are relevant to planning. It recognizes multiple, relational approaches of dynamic complexity which enhance understandings of, and facilitate working with, contingencies of place, time and the various participants' behaviours. In doing so, it should contribute to a better understanding of processes with regard to our physical and social worlds.

Chapter 1
Complexity and Spatial Planning: Introducing Systems, Assemblages and Simulations

Gert de Roo, Jean Hillier and Joris Van Wezemael1

1.1 What about planning in a fuzzy, fluid world?

Proposing interventions within the urban space is like putting your head into a lion’s mouth. It is the spatial planner’s job to create a bridge between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ (or in normative terms: ‘what should be’). The ‘what is’ represents issues such as traffic congestion, appreciation of more space, the need for cheap housing, tensions between stakeholders, the call for public safety, undesirable urban landscapes, and much more. These difficulties are seen by the public and the media (not to mention the opposition within the political arena) preferably in black or white, or requiring a yes or no answer, therefore assuming these can be tackled easily.

Every planner knows from experience that even out of fairly straightforward planning issues, fuzzy and fluid moments emerge that are full of uncertainties and could easily result in legislative jungles, bureaucratic nightmares and confusing power relations. Moreover, a growing number of planning issues are not straightforward at all, being overly complicated throughout the various stages of the planning process, with no-one being able (anymore) to grasp all of the aspects of any one project. This is caused by increasing internal and external complexities. Both space and time, being points of reference in planning and the issues it deals with, also add to the complexities. With regard to space and place, this constrains as well as implies a difference, and it injects a notion of distribution (Craviolini, Van Wezemael, Wirth, 2011). This distribution, as Thrift (1999) argues, accounts for much of what happens in the world. With regard to time, so ignored by planners (De Roo, 2010b), it produces an order of concomitance with distinct and emerging properties, as well as non-linear change.

There is also the issue of contextual dynamics in spatial planning, which is becoming increasingly relevant as a result of a rapidly changing environment, but also because of changing societal opinions (what matters today was not an issue five years ago, and might no longer be an issue, say, five years from now). Experienced planning practitioners therefore take a humble position while playing the game called spatial development. This ‘game’ is by no means an academic fun park, where everything goes as planned, where moves can be well explained and always have a happy ending. On the contrary, it is a very serious ‘game’ full of pitfalls and with rules that are still barely understood.

Most of the issues that matter within the realm of spatial planning are not easily defined, if a definition is possible at all. This ambiguity continues to increase due to the growing complexities of our society and the dynamics of urban life. Thus, the control that remains is seen by some as a mere illusion. The response often seen attempts to reduce the project into smaller parts that are better understood. This does not mean, however, that the project as a whole is understood, let alone controlled. What are the consequences for spatial planning if nothing is any longer what it seems and everything is in flux? Are we meant to be thinking outside the box, finding alternative means to grasp reality, celebrating story lines, discourses and metaphors and conducting proper situation analyses, taking account of a more dynamic perspective on the reality we are in? Planners must find ways to engage in the development of futures-to-come; however, they are doing a bad job if these worlds cannot be related to an understanding of the here and now, and how it evolves. Thus, neither adhering to a ‘positivists’ reality nor merely plunging into a sea of social constructs will do the job.

One promising approach to moving beyond the ‘facts-versus-stories’ contradiction is to identify the theoretical ideas that appreciate dynamics, flows and uncertainty, and to carefully consider possible bridges and linkages between these theoretical ideas and both planning theory and practice. The complexity sciences offer such a perspective for understanding and dealing with dynamics, flows and uncertainty, and much more. This volume is the second concerned with issues of complexity in the Ashgate series, New Directions in Planning Theory. The first volume, edited by Gert de Roo and Elisabete Silva (2010), highlighted the variety of meanings that complexity possesses as a concept in planning theory and practice. As such, the volume represented the ‘planner’s first encounters with complexity’ (De Roo and Silva, 2010: 10). In this second volume we hope to make a substantial step forward, with authors who have tried to delve further into the mechanisms of complexity, superimposing these on spatial planning and decision-making in order to make sense of their planning practices and experiences in a dynamic world that time and again generates states that are far from equilibrium.

In support of this more in-depth analysis that will discuss complexity and planning from a systems perspective, an assemblage perspective and a simulations perspective, this introduction presents the philosophical context of the volume as a whole. This context is intended to be a common ground, a rough framework, from which the discipline of spatial planning and the complexity sciences – and their intertwining – can be understood (see Section 1.2). Our ‘common ground’ opens up a number of established pathways for thinking about the world, for making sense of it. It is a toolbox for navigation that will – hopefully – be helpful to the reader of this volume. This common ground is outlined in terms of four different perspectives on reality that are partly complementary and allow for different entry points into a planner’s engagement with complexity – representing his/her (theoretical) background and harvesting different perspectives.

We feel that it would not be wise to begin a volume on planning and complexity with a proclamation of ‘one coherent world’; rather, the openness and indeed the ambiguity of our framework reflects key insights from complexity thinking (see below). More precisely, we welcome lines of thought that can be related to realism, idealism, relativism and relationalism as a reference for considering the various ways in which spatial planning and the complexity sciences can be understood, as a reference to proposed linkages between spatial planning and complexity, and as a reference for positioning the various contributions in this book.

However, we will not make use of these philosophical perspectives as ready-made ‘boxes’ in which we place the contributions – this would be an injustice to most of the authors. Rather, we use these perspectives as a means to navigate through the sea of ideas and approaches created by the interaction and thinking of planning and complexity together. In planning theory, reference is frequently made to realism, critical realism and relativism. We believe these issues are of value but constrain the debate. In positioning complexity within the realm of planning theory we strongly feel that relationalism (valuing is relation-dependent – referring to various ‘degrees of …’ in planning and complexity) and idealism (making reference to time) are also relevant if we are to understand our world, which is a non-linear world that is out of equilibrium.

Our contribution to the debate on planning theory is to examine relationalism and idealism, which is desirable in relating the complexity sciences to planning theory and being able to benefit from the complexity sciences within planning theory. We will also briefly outline the nature of ‘complexity’. Complexity is a term within the complexity sciences that represents a materially identifiable mechanism and also acts as a metaphorical umbrella and conceptual framework for a variety of understandings and debates. The introduction then presents some of the more prominent streams of thought that constitute various complexity theories and actual and possible bridges between them. A guide to the volume’s structure will then be provided to assist readers in navigating its contents.

1.2 It’s all mind-stuff

Since Immanuel Kant (2003 [1781]) it is widely accepted that the mind is the centre of our self-understanding, as well as our understanding of others and the universe that surrounds us. Or, as Arthur Eddington (1928) stated, ‘The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.’ The mind mirrors all that comes to us, either through the senses or through our reasoning, and it allows us to construct a perceived and logical reality that we reflect upon and challenge continuously, and through which we deconstruct, reconsider and adapt to our latest insights (a process that usually takes place within the subconscious).

This does not mean there is clarity about how the mind constructs one or many realities and how these constructed realities condition our movements, choices and responses to the outside world. Nor should the notion of ‘mind-stuff’ be misread as a claim for mere social constructivism. However, while rejecting a perspective that reduces the world to what the mind (or an interaction of various minds) makes of it, we wish to point out that spatial planning needs to be able to develop alternative futures which relate people, places, discourses, and more, in varying ways. The alternative futures produced on this basis (ideas, story lines, draft plans, etc.) can and should then be discussed, debated and evaluated. Our starting point should help us consider the variety of modes in which the materiality of humanity or the spatiality of the social, political and economic realms can be approached.

There are various ideas, by and large from philosophers and psychologists, about how to conceptualize the way we understand the reality of which we are part. These various ideas represent differences in opinion as to what triggers the mind most and how this influences our understanding. We take the view that the various opinions and ideas do matter and are valid in some way, as they represent a variety of routes to understanding. We take it as important to consider not just one but the variety of routes to understanding reality, ideally in combination with each other, as we believe this is also what our mind does.

The routes that we propose to consider are realism, idealism, relativism and relationalism. We see these as partly complementary in understanding the outside world, and we consider them relevant to a reflection upon the discipline of spatial planning, the complexity sciences and the way these two possibly relate. These routes represent four different strategies of argumentation about how reality is given, perceived and understood, and how reality features identities or images of social and physical environments that are appreciated by the many. We will outline the four perspectives in order to construct a frame of reference that helps us to recombine two streams of thought: the discipline of spatial planning and the complexity sciences.

Realism and critical realism

From a traditional realist perspective, an object has an intrinsic meaning which is apparent to us in the encounter with it. Taking this to its extreme, one could say there is just one ‘true’ reality. As such, the world can be understood through a subject-object relationship. The understanding focuses by and large on the object (entity) and its causal interactions with its environment. Through cause and effect relationships the object unveils its ‘given’ quality, and this quality is represented by functionalities relating to the object that explain how ‘it’ works through internal mechanisms and how we can make use of these mechanisms. The validity of the observation is tested by repetitive measures and repeat results, and if done correctly, predictability regarding future developments becomes possible. Within spatial planning, this realist perspective has led to a strong focus on goals-and-means relationships, conceiving of the planner as the ‘expert’ in these relationships, and laying ground for some planners to believe they could create the world single-handedly.

Such a realist perspective and its object orientation considers that the subject is able to become aware of an outside world through its interactions with what is physically ‘real’. These interactions with the material world (the physical as well as the social) lead us to experiences from which we learn and from which we gain understanding of this outside world. As a result of this process of interaction we gain knowledge upon which we base our choices while responding to the outside world. The contribution by Byrne in this volume is particularly helpful in this respect.

The traditional realist stance has been criticized in many ways, giving rise to a revision in the form of so-called critical realism (Sayer, 1984; Yeung, 1997). This strand of reasoning considers that humans are limited in interpreting all that comes through the senses. Full objectivity is therefore an illusion. The best we humans can do is to continuously critically assess our interpretations of what is given and what we think is given. This is sometimes referred to as ‘representative realism’, as there is an interpretive step between the object and the observer. Despite the acceptance of an interpretative phase between the object and the observer, causality is considered to be the main route to understanding reality.

Today we increasingly acknowledge that the result of this subject-object encounter is a biased view, which is a ‘functional’ reality. Causality, or as the explanation of events taking place as a result of action (cause) and reaction (effect) between objects (or functions or messages or …), is also no longer an outspoken representative of this functional reality, as we have to consider remote causal (‘causa remota’ or indirect causality) relationships in addition to direct causal relationships (‘causa proxima’). With regard to the complexity sciences we must also acknowledge non-linear causalities and causalities that are self-referential. Despite the growing ambiguity regarding causality, planning theory has always been very strongly related to this critical realist perspective on reality. In planning theory this is represented by the functional, instrumental or technical rationale as the driving force behind planning and decision-making.

Finally, recent contributions to planning theory (Van Wezemael, 2008, 2010; see also the contributions by Monno, Trummer and Hillier and Van Wezemael in this volume) have introduced Deleuzian/Delandian thought and with it a ‘neo-realist’ approach. It argues that a belief in the autonomous existence of the world offers insights into the genesis of form that provide a way out of essentialist or rationalist views. It can therefore be considered as a form of relationalism (see below).

Idealism

As the second of the four perspectives on reality, we propose idealism. It contrasts with traditional realism insofar as it does not build on the idea of an absolute existence but on ideas per se. Ideas, abstractions and imaginings are products that our mind is very capable of constructing. Through ideas we are able to deviate from our ideas of the ‘real’ as a mere reflection of the realist’s ‘given’, and to reflect upon it from a virtual distance, without this having to become a metaphysical exercise (in this respect idealism is an appreciated precondition of relationalism and vice versa). This enables us to think through how a reality could be in an imaginary or virtual way (imagined reality), which could lead to the ideal in contrast to the real. This is what planners and decision-makers do: they compose and suggest a desired outcome (the ideal) to tackle the difficulties we face today.

Schopenhauer (2000 [1851]) defined the ideal as ‘mental pictures’ out of which we deduct ‘subjective knowledge’. For Schopenhauer, the ‘ideal’ is synonymous with ‘ideas in a subject’s mind’, raising considerations regarding the relationship between our ideas and the reality that surrounds us. The ideal is therefore a representation of the images we produce in our head, with the world being nothing but a representation – consciously perceived and reasoned and unconsciously grasped – based on mental pictures we are able to produce. In its extreme, the consequence is that our awareness of the ‘real’ remains restricted to our own consciousness. Taking a less extreme position, it is reasonable to say that above all we are aware of anything through mental representations, from which we deduce the message about something happening out there. What precisely is happening out there remains, for the mind, a mental construct about which we are able to communicate with others and which, in return, colours our mental construct again as it links in intersubjectively with others (relativism, see below).

Models, for example, are tools designed to help us obtain a better grip on reality, proposing representations of the ‘real’. Models are simplifications ‘replacing reality with its representation’ (Batty, 2005: 515). Building a fruitful representation is, on the one hand, about simplifying the ‘real’ (realism, see above) and, on the other hand, about constructing mind frames for considering the various components of the model and how these components (might) interrelate.

Idealism is not, however, so much about how the world ‘is’ but how it ‘could be’. It refers to a capacity of our minds to compose ‘another’ world, however much related to the ‘real’, it can propose different ‘reals-to-come’. In this imagined realm we can play with ‘reality’. This allows us to imagine, for example, desired, extreme or ‘worst-case’ realities which differ from what we consider to be the actual ‘real’.

However, from the perspective of idealism, the ‘real’ as the offspring of realism is also no more than just an idea. The importance of idealism is therefore to acknowledge that we can move beyond what we perceive as ‘real’, whatever the ‘real’ is, to deconstruct and reconstruct this ‘real’, proposing a different content to a form, an alternative function for a structure, or various scenarios for a process and so on. As such, we humans are able to give an alternative, aberrant meaning to an object, situation, story, discourse, etc., which puts these into a different perspective and might alter the use we put them to and the way we see them in relation to other objects,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• New Directions in Planning Theory
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Complexity and Spatial Planning Introducing Systems, Assemblages and Simulations
• Part I: Theoretical Reflections Bridging Complexity and Planning
• Part II: Complex Systems and Planning, in between the Real and the Relative
• Part III: Assemblage and a Relational Attitude to Planning
• Part IV: Simulating in between the Real and the Ideal
• Index