A Planner's Encounter With Complexity by Gert de Roo & Elisabete A. Silva

Author:Gert de Roo & Elisabete A. Silva [Roo, Gert de & Silva, Elisabete A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regional Planning, Public Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317187080
Google: J_C_CwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29642215
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

9.2 Featuring relational complexity

Opening to some complexity approaches

Planners use concepts of space to imagine the concrete and abstract spaces of, for example, brownfields, railways, flood plains or provincial territories. Complexity approaches can support our understanding about how planners conceptualise these spaces in a relational way. ‘Complexity’ is doing ‘metaphorical, theoretical and empirical work within many social and intellectual discourses and practices besides “science”’ (Urry, 2005b, p. 2); accordingly, we assume that some complexity approaches can be helpful in planning research about practices. Therefore, we have to enter the field of complexity approaches, which is made complex by the various scientific foundations and assumptions about knowledge and predictability. Thrift (1999) regards complexity theory as ‘a scientific amalgam’ and ‘an accretion of ideas, a rhetorical hybrid’ (p. 33). We focus on complexity approaches that take into account the qualities of the relational approach of space and planning. Planning theories have included rational and technical conceptions of planning, as well as contextualised and linguistic conceptions. In this ‘cluttered landscape’ of respectively positivist and post-positivist approaches of planning (Allmendinger, 2002, p. 29), the relational approach of space corresponds with some post-positivistic planning approaches. Following this relational line, we leave out the option of complexity theory as being one ‘theory of everything’ (Manson and O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 678), because spatial understanding is coloured and constructed (cf. Section 9.1). Additionally, we acknowledge that human-environment research pushes complexity research beyond its usual focus on stylized, “toy-like” models towards the messy reality of human decision making in the context of social and natural complex systems’ (O’Sullivan et al., 2006, p. 613). Due to the ‘messy reality’ in planning, we differ from a positivistic complexity approach if this approach includes simplified models of merely non-relational aspects. Alternatively, we recognise that a relational approach is associated with:

… a growing awareness of the limitations of any and all tools for understanding complex systems. Indeed, there is no way to fully comprehend a complex system and therefore no way to intervene in them in a totally risk-free way – taking action always means taking a step into the unknown to some degree. An understanding of complexity requires an understanding of the limits to one’s analyses. Such an understanding changes the way in which we regard these tools – not as accurate representations of reality, but as useful fictions to facilitate limited sense making. So complexity thinking is not only about the tools we use, but also how those tools are used (Richardson, 2007, p. 281; cf. Cilliers, 2005).

Within a relational approach of planning and space, conceptualisation of space can be regarded as a tool that has ‘limitations’, yet it is a ‘useful fiction’ (ibid.). We focus on a combination of two complexity aspects to understand how planners deal with complexity of space in a relational way with the help of concepts of space as tools. Firstly, we focus on expectations about the possibilities and outcome of dealing with complexity of space; that is, the likely reaction to complexity of planners who apply relational approaches to space.

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