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.