This book is a roadmap for urban professionals, planners
and urban researchers in the challenging practice of
integrating complexity, co-production processes and
resilient thinking in urban development. Through an
extensive set of in-depth case studies and a comparative
framework of analysis, we explore and address the
financial, legal and spatial challenges of adaptive urban
development. The book comprises a collection of urban
projects from Turkey, Denmark, The Netherlands and Finland.
It is the result of an internationally funded research
project coordinated by the University of Amsterdam.
PLANNING PROJECTS
IN TRANSITION
INTERVENTIONS, REGULATIONS
AND INVESTMENTS
FEDERICO SAVINI & WILLEM SALET (EDS)
PLANNING PROJECTS
IN TRANSITION
—
INTERVENTIONS,
REGULATIONS
AND INVESTMENTS
Federico Savini & Willem Salet (EDS)
COLOPhON
© 2017 by jovis Verlag Gmbh
Texts by kind permission of the authors.
Pictures by kind permission of the photographers
/holders of the picture rights.
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Land-use plan IJburg (first phase, 1996),
Municipality of Amsterdam
Design, layout and cover:
Marine Delgado (info@marinedelgado.com)
Printed in the European Union
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists
this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet
at www.dnb.d-nb.de
jovis Verlag Gmbh
Kurfürstenstraße 15/16
10785 Berlin
www.jovis.de
jovis books are available worldwide in select bookstores.
Please contact your nearest bookseller or visit www.jovis.de
for information concerning your local distribution.
ISBN 978-3-86859-415-7
ALI MADANIPOUR
/
COMMENTARy
SOCIAL
COMPLExITy
AND PRAGMATIC
FLExIBILITy
ALI MADANIPOUR
/
I am very grateful to the editors for inviting me to offer some relections
on the book, which is the outcome of an international collaboration of
distinguished researchers in a major European research project. The interface between the consolidated institutions of power and the processes
of urban change is an important and challenging area of investigation. As
the authors have made an excellent undertaking to develop a coherent
argument and substantiate their approach through major empirical investigations, I limit my relections to a brief engagement with the two topics
of pragmatic lexibility and social complexity.
The book is based on a critique of the large-scale urban projects, which
have failed to live up to their promises and a search for alternative ways
of planning. It deines a planning paradox, between control and self-organization and offers to go beyond it through the synthetic approach of a
pragmatic compromise. Three dilemmas are identiied in planning around
the themes of intervention, regulation and investment. The authors invite
planners to be more lexible in the way they deine spatial and temporal
limits for their interventions, by allowing spontaneous and unplanned
activities to take place within the legal frameworks and by adjusting their
expectations of income from real estate investment in relation to the risks
involved. In short, while planning’s needs to use spatial, temporal, regulatory and economic controls are acknowledged, planners are invited to be
more lexible when faced with the dilemmas of intervention, regulation
and investment.
COMMENTARy
SOCIAL COMPLExITy
AND PRAGMATIC
FLExIBILITy
231
COMMENTARy
232
SOCIAL COMPLExITy AND PRAGMATIC FLExIBILITy
The investigation faces the age-old question of how to reconcile legitimate
state control with freedom of action in society, as played out in planning.
In a sense, this is one of the manifestations of a classic tension, which lies
at the heart of the western liberal-democratic politics: combining liberalism, in which individuals are encouraged to act freely and democracy, in
which these individuals need to work together towards collective goals.
This relationship is always tense, as individual and collective needs and
goals may not coincide and the role of politics may be ambiguous, at times
reduced to managing the conlict of interests. The problem becomes the
clariication and justiication of the basis on which power is exerted and
planning makes its judgements. This relects the changing relationship
between the state and society under neoliberalism, in which some social
and economic freedoms have been facilitated with negative implications
for the democratic aspirations of social and economic equality.
The challenge for planning and more broadly for the liberal democratic
state, is how to ‘plan’ a situation in which the agents are expected to feel
and act freely. What we are witnessing is the reorganization of the state’s
rationale in order to deal with this apparent paradox, which brings forward
new questions about the roles, responsibilities and legitimacy of the state.
In the process, the forms of freedom that are enabled for the agents vary
widely, triggered and sorted according to the logic of the market and according to the highly differential positions of these agents in the social
space. State control, of which planning is an example, is theoretically justiied and legitimized on the basis of facilitating the freedom of action for
all, hence keeping the horizon open for innovation and development. It is,
however, also legitimized on the basis of safeguarding collective beneits
in highly differentiated and increasingly unequal societies. The question,
therefore, would not be restricted to the eficiency and predictability of
planning to exert control over a complex society, but to recognise the political nature of the relationship and its ethical dimensions and the changing
relations between the state institutions, market operations and social action.
The task becomes the dual challenges of analyzing control: by whom, to
what purpose and with what consequences; and analyzing complexity and
self-organization: who is involved, in what capacity and to what end.
The analysis of control and lexibility is located within the changing
nature of the political, economic and social institutions and the changing
relationship between them. Municipal planners tend to represent the state
in urban development processes, but as the state has changed its priorities
and its level of intervention in society, the role and power of planning have
also been radically transformed. From a situation in which it was one of the
state’s key instruments in shaping the city, planning has been pressed to
justify its relevance and usefulness by becoming a facilitator of the lows
of investment. As the state institutions are urged to follow the model of
private corporate management and as partnerships between the public and
private sectors are used as models of coproduction, the boundaries
between the state and the market become ever more blurred.
233
ALI MADANIPOUR
/
COMMENTARy
The market institutions, meanwhile, are also transformed, where larger
companies draw on increasingly globalized resources, exposed to global
shocks and risks that would wipe out many plans and predictions, with
structural implications for the urban economy. The heightened conditions
of risk for the market operators could make them more dependent on the
state infrastructure decisions and planning regulations, demanding a vision
of economic growth that would offer a degree of security and proitability.
The nature of civil society in de-industrialized societies has also changed,
as the make-up of the population has diversiied, fragmented and many
common cultural and political frameworks have declined. This would be
relected in detachment from the traditional political parties and responses
that might be limited to ighting for survival and against various threats,
rather than constructing common visions of the future.
From a theoretical perspective, it is interesting to see how the theories
of complexity and self-organization meet with pragmatist theories and
how their interface can be used in analyzing the relationships between the
formal institutions of the state and the social processes of urban development and change. What is particularly interesting to look for is the political and ethical aspects of this interface: if the social processes are complex
and self-organizing and if the public institutions adopt a lexible outlook,
how can responsibility for actions be made explicit and how can the negative impacts of some processes on vulnerable populations be avoided? If
we adopt the metaphors of the natural processes and adaptation to these
social processes, how can we establish the claims of agency and responsibility for action in the public domain?
If we accept incremental planning as pragmatic and realistic, the question becomes: what are the tools at our disposal to perform incremental
planning? Is there a mechanism for intervention and feedback, or is it
merely responding to market signals? Envisaging an incremental planning
process would require the necessary powers in the hands of the planners
to reine and reshape the process through relecting on each increment of
urban development and ine-tune it accordingly. In the context of the
market dominance and the withdrawal of the government from many areas
of the economy, are those powers still available to the planner?
The option of developing clear and predictable visions and insisting
on implementing them seems to be completely out of reach for planners,
as most of their basic assumptions and powers have been curtailed. Their
claims to representing the public interest, to using scientiic methods of
analysis, evaluation and proposal, to developing comprehensive and longterm goals, to mobilizing public resources to meeting these goals and the
social beneits of their implemented plans, all seem to have faded away.
Instead, planners are faced with the challenge of unpredictability, under
the conditions of the state’s increasing embrace of the market perspective,
in which contingency and lexibility are advocated as the only ways of
coping with uncertainty. Pragmatic lexibility and collaboration with the
234
SOCIAL COMPLExITy AND PRAGMATIC FLExIBILITy
other stakeholders has been identiied as a way of managing this uncertainty, but the balance of power in such coproduction processes may be
radically far from the discourses that present and justify them. As an
economic rather than a social logic has been in ascendancy, planning’s
historical roots in social reform seem like a distant memory. The more
adaptable it becomes, the more it risks accommodating the market demands and the further moving from its stated social and environmental
goals. How can a balance be struck between the need for lexibility and
the different forces and trajectories that are opened up on the way?
Rather than a universal meaning and application, the concept of lexibility could only be understood in relation to that which is considered to be
rigid and inlexible and therefore lexibility would always be localized and
in relation to a particular context. In the contexts where municipalities are
fairly powerful, welfare state has historically been strong and planning has
been a key instrument of the welfare state and, more broadly, of reshaping
the country’s geography, lexibility might mean something very speciic to
this context. Flexibility might mean something completely different where
a high degree of lexibility might have already been built into the planning
system, where the state is more entrepreneurial, where the welfare state
may have been weaker or has been more under attack, where municipalities
are weaker vis-à-vis the central government or more aligned with the market logic, where development pressure is either too high or nonexistent,
where planning has been less consolidated or under so much pressure that
any further lexibility would lead to its demise, or where lexibility might
be considered a hazardous path to illegal development and corruption.
My second topic of relection is the applicability of concepts such as
emergence, systems and complexity, to analyzing the social world of the
city. Urban processes are rooted in particular histories and at the intersection of various social forces. How far are biological metaphors capable
of rendering explicit the diversity of forces and the political and ethical
dimensions of evaluating the actions of these forces? Are these forces
conceptualized as natural forces that would inevitably lead to emergent
situations, as if not directed by some powerful force steering events to
particular directions, or are they open for alternative possibilities that any
particular composition of forces would produce?
When coming across the theme of self-organizing cities, one of the irst
analytical steps would be looking for that ‘self’ of a city, which is thought
to be capable of organizing itself. Can we ind such a self in a huge multiplicity of people and objects, where different forces are at work in many
different directions? In effect, we are faced with many selves, each with a
different stake and levels of engagement and expectation. Can a group of
local households who get together to provide a playground for their children and a group of major developers who form a consortium to develop
a major part of the city, both be considered as different forms of self-organization? Can such a multiplicity be reduced to a particular deinition, so
235
ALI MADANIPOUR
/
COMMENTARy
as allow us to identify a single self, a core for it? Such deinition would
depend on our analysis of social ontology: what are the agents and relationships that constitute the society, which ones are involved in the urban
development process and what is the relative signiicance of each player
and relation? Do we envisage society as a level playing ield in which the
players are equally able to carve out their own trajectories? Or do we
recognise an existing landscape with well-trodden routes, long-established
memories, enduring institutional structures and powerful agencies, which
may frame the actions of other players?
Planning and self-organizing might seem at irst glance to be the opposites of each other: purposeful action and emerging formations. The
word self-organization appears inherently to suggest that it is to be distinguished from a mode of organization in which the self is not involved, or
in other words, where something is organized by some forces outside itself.
It seems to suggest a situation in which there is a separation between the
structures of power and the society and there has been either an apparent
shift of power from those structures to the society itself, or the rise of
alternative and parallel forms of organization alongside these structural
forces. From an alternative perspective, however, planning and other
public institutions cannot be assumed to be outside this society. If the
particular society in which planning takes places is envisaged as a selfcontained system, despite the dificulties of making such an assumption
in a global age, then planning is one of the many processes that unfold
within this system, interacting with other processes that are at work.
Whatever form that it takes, planning might be imagined as an ingredient
of self-organization, rather than its nemesis.
There have been many limitations and controversies in the application
of biological metaphors to the analysis of society. Darwin’s theory of
evolution, which addresses the very slow process of biological change,
when applied to society, became a mantra for the survival of the ittest in
a society envisaged as a battleground. The Chicago School of Ecology’s
application of biological metaphors to the urban processes assumed a
degree of inevitability in urban change, as if denying the agency of the
urban populations to change their lives and the responsibility of the decision makers towards them. Even if we accept the application of biological
metaphors, we will then need to deine where to draw the boundaries
around a system: where does it start and end?
If such an analysis is undertaken, the logic of biological adaptation
would require showing in detail the changes of the environment, the feedback loop and the possible responses. However, human beings respond
to a wide range of stimuli and the reductive idea of self-interest as the
primary rationale for human action has long been dismissed. The problem
of using the long-term, biological adaptation model to explaining the
much shorter processes of social change is that human beings can decide
to challenge and change, rather than adapt to, the environment, whereas
236
SOCIAL COMPLExITy AND PRAGMATIC FLExIBILITy
many other biological organisms have no choice but to adapt or die. This
brings about major political and ethical implications for the social agents,
which are different from the general biological change processes.
The logic of biological change, which unfolds through millions of years
through adjustment to the environment, is applied to social processes that
unfold in only a few years. The application becomes a metaphor, a political weapon used for questioning the eficiency and legitimacy of the
state’s intervention in the economy, arguing that the economy and society
would organise themselves without the need for much oversight or intervention by the state. The nature and role of the state would nevertheless
remain always an important question to raise. At the same time, the problem with seeing the market relations as natural and state intervention as
artiicial is that it tends to ignore that the market is a highly institutionalized set of relationships, which might appear completely unnatural to
those who are not socialized within them, such as the members of other
societies. The realm of civil society, meanwhile, is imagined as a sphere
that is distinguishable from the calculations and interventions, of the
political and economic interests, as a complex and yet homogeneous realm
of innocent domesticity and political legitimacy, without being exposed
to a critical social analysis.
The interface between the infrastructure of state power and the activities
of the market and civil society is an important area for research. The social
and political analysis of the processes and meanings of lexibility and complexity would help rendering this interface more transparent and its implications for vulnerable groups and the environment easier to recognise.