Spatial Planning and the Complexity of Turbulent, Open Environments: About purposeful interventions in a world of non-linear change

In this chapter we will argue that discontinuous change is the only constant factor in the world we are part of. And what seems stable to us is actually nothing more than a temporary period of persistence, a frozen instant within a dynamic world, the lee side of a world in flux. As there is no permanent stability, how can we reach an ideal situation? Instead, we have to acknowledge that tensions, frictions, mismatches and breaks will be more or less ever-present. This means we continuously have to consider and reconsider how the world around us is ‘becoming’, and to what it is we have to adapt. This understanding is fundamental: instead of the planner being the creator of space and place, we are acknowledging that the world also creates itself, often develops beyond our control and progresses autonomously despite our intentions. It may be worth considering planners as guides to coping with autonomous and non-linear change. This contribution starts by exploring the meanings and background of the relevant ideas in this discussion, such as non-linearity, complexity and uncertainty. Together, these notions represent the complexity sciences, processes of discontinuous change and evolutionary pathways through time. We will see amongst others how these notions can be instrumental to the evolution of settlements. This route to transforming settlements will be framed by an evolutionary model which not only explains the transformation of settlements as complex adaptive systems, but also frames the transformative space at the edge of order and chaos. Consequently, we will see how transformations and bifurcations can be understood as mechanisms of non-linearity and change. Finally, this contribution confronts contemporary planning theory with our set of ideas from the complexity sciences and our evolutionary model, and how the model frames reality in a non-linear and transformative way. It will demonstrate the relevance of a non-linear, transformative and dynamic understanding to the planning debate