Thank God, the city is complex

The majority of the Worlds’ population lives in cities, which are increasingly under pressure of all kinds of change. In general this is seen as an increase of risk: placing more people under influence of change makes them more vulnerable. In a linear world this may be true, but cities have a coincidental luck: they are complex systems and able to adjust when unexpected impacts occur. Despite the fact that a city is qualified as a complex system, we still do not treat her as one. Most of the literature only emphasises analysis and understanding of the city as a complex system: the city is explained. The main problem originates here: this analysis is still undertaken from a technical-rational planning perspective. When it comes to planning a city to become resilient for change, it involuntary brings solutions based in the engineering paradigm. And these create, for the larger part, more a resistant urban system than a responsive one. Alternatively, to create urban, socio-ecological systems with high resiliency, two elements need to be part of a fundamental different planning approach: first the desired outcome of the planning process must enhance realisation of agile, rhizomic cities and secondly the planning process itself must be organised differently in order to achieve these desired outcomes, for instance through bridging the interests and knowledge of scientists and policymakers. 1. Swarm planning is a recent addition to the toolkit of the urban designer, planner or futurist It emphasises the complexity of both the spatial system as well as the impacts as a result of wicked problems. Instead of creating a fixed plan for the future Swarm Planning proposes to design strategic interventions and literally create space for change. The designs delivered as result of the Swarm Planning approach anticipate uncertainties of future change and take these as the starting point of spatial developments. When the spatial grades of freedom are subsequently increased the effects of spatial interventions lead to emergent landscapes. The impact of this new approach for practice is dual: the spatial future of a region is no longer unchangeable as it amplifies the potential to modify land-use or urban patterns and secondly, the planning process demands from policymakers and politicians the ability to ‘undecide’, amending former decisions according to new insights. 2. The ‘science-policy-interface’ is widely discussed, but in many occasions they continue to be separated worlds. One way of bridging the gap is to make scientists functional in the policymaking process, and simultaneously allow local experts to contribute their (nonacademic) knowledge to scientific discussions and discourses. In concrete planning processes they even must be challenged to change their respective roles. The way this has been undertaken is by organising faceto- face creative discussion with a concrete objective: e.g. to create a spatial vision for a region under change, allowing participants to contribute their skills, knowledge and experience to the design. As result of these planning processes it is proposed to mandate a group of planners, consisting of a combination of policymakers and scientists, with the task to constantly ‘check and balance’ whether new design interventions are beneficial. This group of people must also constantly change to prevent people to become ‘attached to their seats’ Several examples of the above described approach will be illustrated in this paper: (1) Climate proofing the regional plan for Groningen province, the Netherlands, (2) Floodable Landscape, Eemsdelta, the Netherlands, (3) Bushfire Resilient Landscape of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia and (4) Dismantable City, consisting of three variants: the Multiple Layer City, Light Urbanism and the Empty City, all in the Netherlands