A Strategic Planning Problem: The Relationship Between Urban Transformation Outcomes and the Temporal Order of Planned Projects

This chapter presents a new computational tool that enables strategic planners to explore the impact of sequences of development towards achieving the United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The hypothesis based on a complexity theory framework is that the order in which projects are built as part of an area’s strategic development can significantly influence future outcomes. A custom-built tool – with an underlying computational simulation - enables the incorporation of bottom-up dynamics and self-organisational behaviours within explorations of urban policy and intervention aimed at spatial and infrastructural change. The simulation treats areas as temporal, spatial and programmatic morphologies with identified relational drivers stemming from a statistical analysis of historic transformations. Transition rules in the simulation model based on historic relations links future development to known trajectories and path dependencies. The tool enables exploration of the longer-term outcomes of major and minor changes within existing dynamics and trajectories of urban transformation. The possibility to test probable outcomes of strategic controls within the model, as well as catalysts within different temporal scenarios, has the potential to contribute significantly to the development of strategic future planning especially in the rapidly developing urban environments of the Global South