Classical urban planning and long term infrastructure investment are based upon assumptions of a stable or slowly changing future. These assumptions rarely hold true over time.
Climate change, resource shortage, innovation, political and social change, economic volatility, natural and technological disasters and political instability all point to a newly emerging context for urban planning. This context has been termed "VUCA", or Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, by the US Army War College.
VUCA conditions are leading to a paradigmatic shift in how we understand and enact urban planning. They are creating a crisis in how we plan and govern.
Theories about how complex systems behave under VUCA conditions, and how to act within them, are well researched. Complex adaptive systems theory (CAS) and the sociology of management under turbulent conditions offers suggestions for how governments and planners might understand and adapt to their changing organizational context.
Unfortunately the implications and claims of complexity and turbulent management strategies have rarely been tested in the context of urban planning and governance. Experiments in this realm are infrequent, expensive (both politically and fiscally) and idiosyncratic.
Yet the need for such experiments, and the understanding resulting from them, is clear. This is especially true in the context of constructivist urban planning, which places almost exclusive emphasis on socially constructed dialogic agreements as the main mechanism of urban governance.
While the corporate and military sectors have produced a range of tools and techniques for addressing long term planning under uncertainty, urban planning and public policy have largely retreated from this challenge by ceding it to a political process of consensus building which often ignores the future.
This poses a special problem for planning in the public domain. Planning's emphasis on dialogic agreement in the present, based primarily on a normative assertion of how human societies should act and how to get things done as a group, is notably different from the corporate sector. In both corporate and military spheres, the normative aspects of the organization's role are not up for debate (i.e., kill the enemy, improve company performance). Thus the dialogic nature of action is more oriented to the pragmatic question of 'what to do next', thereby allowing more functional exploration of the best tools for understanding and dealing with dynamic volatility over time.
As a result, governance in general and urban governance in particular pose a more complex problem than that of private sector bodies grappling with these issues. Both the goals and the process for achieving them are open for debate, resulting in a paradox of greater fluidity and uncertainty combined with greater restrictions and a generally restricted ability to act.
The challenge then, is to prototype a range of approaches that recognize the difficulties and contingencies of urban governance, yet offer tangible solutions for moving beyond them.
A variety of social and technological shifts have occurred in the last decade which alter the terms of engagement and engender new possibilities for creative co-governance in the face of dynamic uncertainty. Swarm organisation, crowd sourcing, sensor nets, real time data collection and analysis, distributed cognition, networked communities, etc., all create new possibilities for action for the urban planner. They also bring urban planning much closer to the evidence offered by complex adaptive systems researchers and management theorists on what constitutes intelligence strategy making in the face of VUCA environments.
Such strategies include the ability to probe, sense, discuss, interpret and act in new ways never before possible in the public sector. This raises the possibility of a new way of doing governance and planning that appears to be better matched to the new challenges faced by urban planners in the 21st Century.
My research explores how such tools and techniques can be applied to the challenge of long term urban planning in the face of uncertainty, with special emphasis on urban climate change adaptation.
.