Innovative land use and green planning in relation to complexity theory

Resumen

In my own experience and that of many colleagues, planning processes often appeared to be stable processes, but could suddenly become very turbulent and unstable. After a rapid change, goals, procedures, planning staff and budgets could then suddenly become totally different from what they were like before. However, the existing planning literature was not interested in this kind of phenomena; it tended to focus on more stable linear processes. For years planning was considered a technical discipline, in which people and space were represented as value-free and objective (Hillier 2008). Since the 1970s, planning increasingly came to be regarded as a more communicative process; stakeholders became ever more important in the planning process, and debates and dialogues became key components of the planning process. Instead of value-free facts, communication and power became highly decisive for the outcome of planning processes and - as a consequence - strategic planning processes and scenario planning to deal with the growing awareness of the role of uncertainty in planning became an important part of most spatial planning processes (Faludi, 2004; Healy 1997, 2003; Innes, 2004). However, these views on planning processes still did not involve a major role for interventions, individual politicians or sudden unexpected events. But what then about my - and other people¿s - interventions? They had been useful, and we had succeeded in introducing innovative and more sustainable approaches into the planning process. Without doubt, these interventions had been highly necessary, and perhaps even the only way at the time to introduce new sustainability concepts into those ¿old fashioned, locked-in planning processes.¿ What were we doing? Were we just individuals, angry young men, lacking the patience - we always said we were running out of time - needed to properly discuss our new ideas so that they could be included in the ongoing planning processes? Or was it completely normal that ¿locked-in planning processes¿, which clearly did not take sustainability sufficiently into account, needed a push from external forces to make them move in the direction that society demanded? Was there just an anomaly in the scientific literature, as many practitioners confirmed after conference presentations? Then, at the ECOSUD conference in Alicante (Villacampa et al, 2001) I was watching a video explaining the ideas on complexity developed by Ilya Prigogine, who first elaborated them in thermodynamics and chemistry and later initiated their extrapolation to natural and social sciences (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Prigogine, 1986). In the same period I received the PhD thesis by Geldof (2001), who applied Complexity Theory to the everyday practice of water management. These two authors provided my first introduction to Complexity Theory and the phenomena of crisis, sudden events rapidly changing a system from one, known situation into another, unknown situation. Their work has been an inspiration for my own thesis. The goal of this thesis is to explore whether (complex) planning processes can be fitted into the framework of Complexity Theory. Can the crisis described by Prigogine (1986) and Geldof (2001) in terms of Complexity be linked with sudden changes in planning processes if a planning process is considered as a complex system? Can I use Complexity Theory to better understand complex planning processes?