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In this chapter, we reflect on the possibilities of purposeful community development in a non-linear understanding of society. Although the complexity and uncertainty that characterize the world put forward challenges for planning and steering, it doesn’t imply that purposive interventions are unlikely to be successful or that planning has become obsolete. It does, however, require a different understanding of how societies organize themselves and about how collective strategies sort reality-effects. Planning, as spatial planning, is a subset of strategy and provides a set of tools for others. In this chapter we highlight the importance of strategy in a world where many of the traditional planning rules and certainties have been challenged. We deepen the discussion about community development by placing it in the context of governance understood as a set of co-evolving actors, institutions, and power/knowledge configurations. Within these ever changing governance systems, forms of organization are necessarily linked to and co-evolve with narratives on identity, community, and governance itself, as the taking of collectively binding decisions. Taking into account the complexity and non-linearity that characterizes these co-evolutionary processes we discuss the links between community formation and the organization and transformation of space through planning. We explore how strategy should be understood in this context and we identify which forms of strategy can work under the structural conditions revealed through the lens of complexity theory and governance theory.

Using a complexity lens has not gained widespread attention for explaining why certain planning processes succeed and others fail. This chapter responds by proposing Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as a method for analyzing the performance of spatial planning processes, taking into account the perceived complexity of the contextual environments encountered. This proposal is rooted in a contingency perspective. Contingency perspectives assume that, for spatial planning approaches and organizational formats to perform well, they should be adapted to the environment in which they intend to operate; i.e., a degree of ‘fit’ is required. The perceived complexity of the contextual environments is among the key arguments contingency studies propose as informing fit. QCA follows this argument, but also responds to some of its main critiques. First, QCA can help avoid a deterministic perspective on complexity informing fit, as it assumes complexity as being conceptualized by stakeholders involved in the planning process. Second, QCA can help overcome a reductionist perspective and its simplistic reliance on a pairwise analysis of relations between isolated environmental variables and isolated organizational or decision-making variables. QCA approaches ‘fit’ from a more holistic perspective, by analyzing the performance of spatial planning processes as configurations of alternative spatial planning approaches, organizational forms, and contextual environments. The result is an understanding of ‘fit’ following what QCA considers ‘complex causality’, which is manifested in configurations of various interacting and interdependent conditions. Next to being able to analyze relationships between the performance of spatial planning processes and the perceived complexity of the contextual environment, by using the notion of ‘complex causality’ QCA also allows for analyzing spatial planning processes as complex adaptive systems.

This chapter constructs a kind of reasoning that is supportive of this alternative frame of reference. It argues that discontinuous change is the only constant factor in the world that people are part of, and what seems stable to them is actually nothing more than a temporary period of persistence. The chapter explores the meanings and background of the relevant ideas in this discussion, such as non-linearity, complexity and uncertainty. Complexity thinking and spatial planning seem almost antagonistic, a conflict of reasoning. The chapter shows that how transformations and bifurcations can be understood as mechanisms of non-linearity and change. It confronts contemporary planning theory with set of ideas from the complexity sciences and evolutionary model, and how the model frames reality in a non-linear and transformative way. Van der Leeuw adopts a non-linear perspective, which he describes as ‘the archaeology of innovation’, to elaborate on how humans have created a socialized environment.

Today’s world is predominantly urban. Most urban regions are located in delta regions. And delta regions face severe pressures because of their fragile environments, their delicate relationship with existing ecological habitats and coastal zones, which need protection, and the increasing constraints and threats due to climate change and sea level, rise. Delta regions are under pressure. Spatial planning is one of the means to maintain quality of living in delta regions. Spatial planning has a strong tradition in taking ‘here and now’ decisions to responding to problems and difficulties, with not much difference in technical and communicative approaches. If spatial planning wants to be supportive to transformations at various levels of scale in urbanized delta regions alternative time related approaches are desperately needed. The plurality of urbanized delta regions forces such time related planning approaches to be emergent, adaptive, co-evolving and transformative in nature. It means planning has to embrace a non-linear understanding of space and place. This book is meant as an introduction to non-linearity and spatial planning.

This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being experts or mediators, we might appreciate planners becoming managers of change, transition managers, adaptive responders and social entrepreneurs, supporting and guiding the various parties within urban and rural areas to find the positions which suit them best. This book acknowledges these new identities and positions, with the planner acting as a manager of change. This book tries to present arguments in support of a discipline of spatial planning which adopts a different stance to the world, a more adaptive stance, and with a keen eye for self-organization processes: an eye for non-linear kinds of planning in a world of change.

This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being experts or mediators, we might appreciate planners becoming managers of change, transition managers, adaptive responders and social entrepreneurs, supporting and guiding the various parties within urban and rural areas to find the positions which suit them best. This book acknowledges these new identities and positions, with the planner acting as a manager of change. This book tries to present arguments in support of a discipline of spatial planning which adopts a different stance to the world, a more adaptive stance, and with a keen eye for self-organization processes: an eye for non-linear kinds of planning in a world of change.

The assumption of linear growth, Plan A, no longer works well, underpinned as it is by arguments deduced from the ‘normal’ sciences and their linear understanding of the world we are part of. Functionality, certainty and predictability have proven to be no longer trustworthy, with serious consequences for city planning. It is not easy to venture out beyond current paradigms, as these are entrenched deeply within us, framing our ideas, attitudes, behaviours and actions. Nevertheless, with this contribution we propose a Plan B and what some would call a ‘post normal’ science perspective, focusing on a non-linear understanding of our world. A non-linear understanding means we consider the world to be undergoing discontinuous change, which is and becomes manifest largely beyond our control. It will have far-reaching consequences for the institutional design used by planners, interacting with and influencing a city’s development. Despite this we believe there are strong arguments in support of a Plan B.