Self-organization and spatial planning in the face of the European refugee crisis

The Handbook on Planning and Complexity deepens the scientific debate on planning and complexity considerably. The Handbook not only links planning as a science of purposeful interventions and complexity as a science of dynamic change and non-linear development. The Handbook also presents surprising new insights into complex urban behaviour that are highly relevant to understanding spatial development and to arrive at new types of spatial planning. The Handbook, for example, builds on the idea that cities show fractal-like structures and behave as complex adaptive systems, with non-linear developments, co-evolving trajectories and transformative forces. In such situations, planning interventions require new types of rationality and adaptive types of institutional design. This Handbook on Planning and Complexity responds to this with new perspectives, concepts, methods and tools. These include adaptive planning, non-linear types of rationality, governance and conditions, and different methods of experimental learning, all coloured with examples of complex urban behaviour. The book connects non-linearity and dynamic change with purposeful interventions. The book combines the theoretical debate about planning and governance with the focus that modellers take on understanding complex behaviour in space and place The book takes time as an explicit variable with non-linear developments as a consequence, and which must be taken very seriously by planning if it wants to continue its leading role in urban development. The book considers complexity and planning not only as an object of empirical orientation, but also includes intersubjective interpretation, appreciation and consideration to arrive at a fruitful understanding. The book sees the world as being in flow, on which changeable, co-evolutionary and transformative behaviour of cities can be explained and through which it can be made clear why "the result can be more than the sum of its parts". The book does not see cities as static entities but as dynamic patterning landscapes, full with patterns of temporary stability. The book offers a realistic alternative to Cartesian reasoning, technical rationality and the rational actor, proposing multiple rationalities which frame and represent various kinds of planning behaviour in a world that is considered to be out-of-equilibrium