Self-organization and Spatial Planning:Foundations, Challenges, Constraints and consequences

Does self-organization matter to planning? Spatial Planning and self-organization: the combination of these two themes is perhaps somewhat unexpected, one being the collective manifestation of ‘intentional’ action, the other representing ‘spontaneous’ phenomena. Spatial Planning labels itself a science of purposeful interventions, while self-organization is a theory of spontaneous order. Nevertheless, this combination has recently been getting serious attention from the planning community. There are a few empirical reasons for this interest, such as the spontaneous but devastating global crisis, affecting the housing, mortgage and financial markets. Since 2008, the crisis has challenged planners to assess traditional practices critically and develop alternative strategies. The repeated failures of large planning projects are another trigger. These projects can no longer be treated as isolated activities, as these are part of a highly interconnected world, which is evolving through unprecedented non-linear chains of causes and effects. Within the planning community there is a growing awareness of a world beyond the planners’ control, a world that is evolving in various autonomous ways. This abstract notion of our world developing non-linearly is a reason to explore emerging theories addressing complexity, non-linearity, adaptivity, co-evolution, transition and self-organization further. Notwithstanding the recent interest, the world in which planners operate has always supported self-organizing processes, even in the traditional, coordinative era of command-and-control policymaking and the controlled reality of technical and functional planning. In the communicative era of planning and policymaking self-organization processes are very much in evidence. Despite this, these processes were ignored, were overlooked, were taken for granted and never got much attention and therefore never became part of mainstream planning. They were just there and did not relate much to the planners’ language of control, regulation and rationality or the planner’s drive to reach consensus and shared responsibility. Therefore, the question is: does self-organization matter in understanding spatial development processes and will such an enriched understanding support planners in addressing a world which is moving beyond our control