Planning and complexity: Engaging with temporal dynamics, uncertainty and complex adaptive systems

Abstract

Planning and complexity: Engaging with temporal dynamics, uncertainty and complex adaptive systemsThe nature of complex systems as a transdisciplinary collection of concepts from physics and economics to sociology and ecology provides an evolving field of inquiry (Laszlo and Krippner, 1998) for urban planning and urban design. As a result, planning theory has assimilated multiple concepts from the complexity sciences over the past decades. The seemingly chaotic or non-linear urban phenomena resulting from the combination of hard and soft systems (Checkland, 1989) or physical and environmental aspects of the city with human intervention, motivation and perception have been of particular interest in the context of increasing criticism of top-down approaches. Processes such as selforganisation, temporal dynamics and transition, previously ignored or assumed problematic within equilibrium-centred conceptualisations or mechanistic theories, have found their way back into planning through complexity theories of cities (CTC) (Allen, 1997;Batty, 2007;de Roo and Silva, 2010;Marshall, 2012;Portugali, 2011b). While there is an overlap with Structuralist-Marxist and humanistic perspectives (Portugali, 2011c) and a continuity from an older science of cities (Batty, 2013), it is interesting to observe the engagement with bottom-up phenomena, structural and functional co-evolution and resultant adaptable and self-organisational systems within complexity planning. It has taken time for planning to adopt complexity thinking beyond metaphor or common usage of the term, but we now appear to be at a tipping point where complexity planning is exploring methods of engagement and cognition, rather than the question of whether cities are complex.Planners are often challenged by the volatility of city systems and networks, by the impact of both foreseen and unforeseen changes and by the high level of interdependencies between elements, both human and non-human (Balducci et al., 2011;Duit and Galaz, 2008;Moroni, 2010;Rauws, 2015). The small collection of papers presented in this themed issue demonstrates attempts to understand processes of change and continuous interaction and to engage with them in the governance and development of cities using a complexity framework. The papers include theoretical and empirical experiments and present methodological innovations. The focus on self-organisation, temporal dynamics and complex adaptive systems (CAS) (Folke et al., 2004;Holland, 1992;Levin, 1998) is evident in both experimental methods and attempts to engage stakeholders in processes of co-creation. The latter has a particular emphasis on creating the conditions to encourage development and emergent structures with the potential to interface with existing governance frameworks. It is noteworthy that several contributions either explicitly or implicitly bridge between planning theory and socio-spatial modelling. As a stage in the ongoing development of CTC, it is also pertinent to observe the adoption of concepts and methods to deal with bot...

A sociotechnical systems approach to understand complex urban systems: A global transdisciplinary perspective

“…Urban planning and design needs new approaches that can better comprehend cities as complex urban systems (Batty, ; Portugali, ; Sengupta, Rauws, & de Roo, ; Stevens, ). While complex systems research has rapidly advanced over the past decades, urban planning and design disciplines are still grappling with the use of methods informed by complexity science (Walloth, Gurr, & Schmidt, ).…”

“…This article explores how a sociotechnical systems approach may provide a better understanding of complex urban systems and how it can inform urban planning and design practice. Such an approach responds to the revival of complexity theory in urban planning (Sengupta et al., ) and the recent call from UN‐Habitat () for applied systems approaches to better understand urban environments.…”

Social Systems: Resources and Strategies

“…For this purpose, they have to be able to adapt to the environment, or, to be more precise, to its indefiniteness [6]. In spite of the fact that the structure of all social systems, especially the large ones, is complex, the systems are quite simple in principle [7].…”

Research on Urban Environment System Based on Complex and Uncertainty Theory

“…It can be said that the ecological city is a social, economic and environmental unity. The optimal allocation of water resources to pay more attention to the simultaneous development of human and ecological environment, the importance of ecological water and water resources, ecological value [7][8]. Therefore, the optimal allocation of eco-city water resources not only to consider the city system itself is comprehensive, complex, and uncertainty, but also consider the ecological water demand and ecological value in the time of the dynamic, the ambiguity of the data, and interaction with other factors and other characteristics of interaction, is an uncertain multi-objective programming problem [9].…”