>> Spatial P

lanning in a Com

plex Unpredictable W

orld of Change

GE

RT D

E R

OO

LUU

K B

OE

LEN

S

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.

www.inplanning.eu

Spatial Planning in a Complex Unpredictable World of Change

Spatial Planning in a Complex Unpredictable World of Change

Towards a proactive co-evolutionary type of planning within the Eurodelta

EditorsGert de Roo and Luuk Boelens

Gert de Roo Luuk Boelens

SPATIAL PLANNING IN A COMPLEX UNPREDICTABLE WORLD OF CHANGE

SPATIAL PLANNING IN A COMPLEX UNPREDICTABLE WORLD OF CHANGE

GERT DE ROO ANDLUUK BOELENS

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EDITION2016

Towards a proactive co-evolutionary type of planning within the Eurodelta

SPATIAL PLANNING IN A COMPLEX UNPREDICTABLE WORLD OF CHANGECOLOPHON

Spatial planning in a complex unpredictable world of changeis published by Coöperatie In Planning UA© Groningen, 2016

www.inplanning.eu

ISBN 978-94-91937-26-2 (print)978-94-91937-27-9 (e-book)

TextGert de Roo and Luuk Boelens

Internal and cover design André Diepgrond (In Ontwerp, Assen)

Digital accessInPlanning Technical Team

InPlanning Editor in Chief

Gert de Roo

Published by InPlanningOude Kijk in ’t Jatstraat 6, 9712 EG Groningen, Nederland

info@inplanning.euwww.inplanning.eu

InPlanning is legally registered as cooperative under KvK 58997121

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This work is intellectual property and subject to copyright. All rights reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the ‘Auteurswet’ (Copyright Law) of the 23th of September 1912, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from InPlanning. Violations are liable to prosecution under Dutch Law.

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>> What to do about spatial planning in a world in change? We live in an era of tremendous change, affecting whole communities and societies financially, socially and spatially. The collapse of the major commercial bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 is seen as marking the start of a massive crisis which affected the entire Western world and beyond. The crisis – or better: plurality of crises – originated in a triad of excessive confidence: markets, governments and citizens persuaded each other for many years that money comes from nowhere and would invariably go on growing if ploughed into real estate, regardless the quality of the investment. How mistaken this all was – the certainty was false and all that was promised, implicitly of course, proved to be thin air. The economy may have taken a real blow, but all the other negative effects of the bad investments which had accumulated over the years also came to light, above all in the world of spatial planning. The consequences were not just a physical mess of unneeded development, but much more: the omnipresence of the financial, mortgage and housing crisis undermined the deeply entrenched faith in a Newtonian planning world.

Despite the communicative turn in the late eighties, the planning community still felt in control, a cornerstone in urban development, visioning both functional and liveable urban futures. The communicative turn was perhaps a response to acknowledging elements of uncertainty and the failure of a factual reality as a basis to work from. However, the response at first was to seek to regain certainty through agreements, resulting in an agreed reality. If there is one thing that this crisis made very clear, it is that an agreed reality is no guarantee of certainty either, if it is not viewed in close conjunction with a factual reality.

The crisis revealed to us an unfounded belief in a world of abundance, where actions could be taken without hesitation and without limitation. The collapse was tremendous, and every time there seemed to be a hint of a light at the end of the tunnel, another collapse emerged from nowhere. At the time of this book’s publication – early 2016 – there is still no one willing or daring enough to say that the crisis is at its end. The pundits have been wrong too often and no longer dare to make promises, knowing that there are hardly any people left willing to listen to them.

What does this mean for the discipline of spatial planning? Clearly there 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

Preface>>

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SPATIAL PLANNING IN A COMPLEX UNPREDICTABLE WORLD OF CHANGEPREFACE

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 change managers, 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 adaptive kinds of planning in a world of change.

This world is not undergoing change just because of the 2008 crisis. There is more going on which relates to the interdependency of global and local developments. To mention but a few: there are still huge numbers of people travelling the globe, seeking better places to live. The effect of climate change will also haunt us, in particular in the very many delta regions around the globe. These regions contain most of the global population, living in densely populated urban conglomerations. Instead of a spatial discipline seeking answers in content and process, the conditions under which change and development occur are becoming increasingly relevant. The discipline of spatial planning is at a turning point, as it has to acknowledge the major changes needed to allow our world in change to remain a pleasant, healthy place to live in.

Putting this book together has been a long, almost four-year story. It was originally intended as scientific advice to the government of the Netherlands regarding their stated ambitions to prepare a Seventh White Paper on Spatial Planning. This Seventh White Paper on Spatial Planning had to come up with answers to the global threats the Netherlands was confronted by. It was therefore expected to consider several prominent questions troubling the administration at the time:

· What are the recent scientific insights with regard to spatial planning and what impact should planning have with regard to the direction of spatial policy in the Netherlands?· Which changes within the current spatial planning policy would offer the best chance of success in these times of crisis?

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· What are the resulting challenges for the development and implementation of the spatial policy of state, province, municipality and/or other stake and shareholders?· What would that mean for the division of responsibilities, tasks and roles and how to implement these changes?

To answer these questions as concretely as possible, seven topics needed to be covered:1 Finding a new balance between growth and contraction in urban development;2 Network orientation in top economic sector policies; 3 Regional development in relation to more sustained revenue models; 4 Transition towards slow food supply;5 Transition towards sustainable energy;6 Synergetic infrastructural and spatial developments;7 Resilient preparations towards climate change.

In that respect a working seminar was held on 6 November 2012 to mark the beginning of a collaboration between scientists and practitioners which culminated in the international conference on co-evolutionary planning of the Association of European Schools of Planners (AESOP) of summer 2014. However, soon after the second Rutte Administration took office in the Netherlands, it became obvious that the government did not have any answers. While it acknowledged that traditional approaches were quite useless and even counterproductive, the government had no idea how to respond to the emerging challenges. Consequently, it deprioritized the preparations for the next Report on Spatial Planning. Instead, it decided to focus first on simplifying its enormous body of legislation. This major exercise was obviously full of good intentions and was a much appreciated initiative, but it did not yield any answers to how to tackle the serious problems confronting the Netherlands and its Delta region. Moreover, the Administration was also entangled in merging the former ministry of Infrastructure and Public Works with the former ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning, a process which dragged on from 2011 onwards. This had a huge impact on the role and position of national spatial planning in general and on prominent spatial practitioners and policy planners specifically.

On the other hand, and in preparation for the 2014 AESOP conference on co-evolutionary planning in Utrecht, the changes in views on spatial planning within a ceaselessly interconnected and complex world gathered pace, as new insights on adaptive, actor-relational and transitional planning approaches collided both with each other and with the traditional but also changing views on planning law, implementation and property rights (the ‘traditional’ professional core of planning).

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Since the Vienna AESOP conference in 2005, AESOP has been debating the complexity of the world we live in, its non-linear behaviour, its sudden changes and the impossibility of controlling these. The AESOP community began debating the search for answers as to how to evaluate the very many autonomous and spontaneous developments which can be observed within urban and rural areas. Since 2005 the AESOP working group on complexity and planning has been most successful, having held a series of meetings and produced a number of books and papers. The complexity track at the annual AESOP conferences has been the second largest since 2010, with numerous scholars participating in the debate on non-linear development. It resulted in various new ideas emerging within the planning community, including coevolution, self-organization and adaptive planning. This book acknowledges these ideas and tries to present them throughout this book in story lines which are meant to open them up and make them accessible to spatial planners.

This book can therefore be regarded as an invitation to a planning profession in transition in more ways than one. As originally signed-up authors dropped out, others stepped in to take their place. The idea of a reciprocal advice for a new White Paper on Spatial planning was dropped and the book refocused on the role of spatial planning in an world of continuous change. It addresses the changing views of planning on increasingly nonlinear, unpredictable situations and patterns which are the result from unintended actions. Some would consider a planning response to these situations, patterns and actions are only possible from the bottom up, in a highly collaborative or coalition-oriented manner. Nevertheless, this book also claims that intentional planning is neither dated nor outdated. It is still quite essential with respect to the seven major social challenges mentioned above. However we consider it innovative to do this in conjunction with for non-linear, adaptive and transformative understandings and approaches.

The book is divided into two parts – the generic and the specific – to report on our quest for new models for co-evolutionary governance and planning in an increasingly complex and self-organizing society. The second part applies these new views to specific challenges in real life practice. Paradoxically, each of the chapters in this book can still be used to consider the current Dutch administration’s reformulated ambition to expand its vision on space and the challenges mentioned above. Moreover, these challenges are not only increasingly recognised in Dutch society as such, but also within administrations elsewhere. Therefore, this book has to be regarded as a prominent transitional step in the ongoing quest for the best reciprocal adaptation of space and society, for the interests of society.

We first have to acknowledge that this book has required quite some patience from its various authors, in particular those who were eager to participate from

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the very beginning. Many, many thanks to them for supporting the project all the way. We also thank those scholars who came on board during the project, as a positive response to our invitation to bridge gaps we believed that were there and had to be covered. We also thank the publisher InPlanning for its full support and its faith in the product we promised. Many thanks to InPlanning for its wonderful distribution of the book among the AESOP planning community, freely and digitally, and for allowing us to share the book without hesitation with anyone with an interest in new developments within the discipline of spatial planning. Their approach to disseminating the book seems as innovative to us as the book’s own message to the planning community: think differently, and adapt to the changes surrounding us. We wish you a pleasant read.

Luuk Boelens Gert de RooGhent University University of GroningenBelgium The Netherlands

January 2016

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Setting the scene – About planning and a world in change 14Gert de Roo and Luuk Boelens

PART A – THE GENERIC

The Role of Planning in Self-Organizing Urban and Regional Systems 32Peter Allen

Self-organization and Spatial Planning – Foundations, challenges, constraints and consequences 54Gert de Roo

Evolutionary Governance Theory and the Adaptive Capacity of the Dutch Planning System 98Raoul Beunen, Martijn Duineveld and Kristof Van Assche

PART B – THE SPECIFIC

The Appropriated City – Citizens taking control? 122Beitske Boonstra and Maurice Specht

The Mobilities of Home – Towards a new Planning for Mobilities based on an Actor-Relational Approach 150Martin Dijst and Antje Gimmler

Integrated energy landscapes – How coevolution encourages planners to focus on developing linkages between renewable energy systems and local landscapes 170Jessica de Boer and Christian Zuidema

Towards an evolutionary network approach of cluster policies – Skill-relatedness, FDI and multilevel governance in Zuid- Holland, The Netherlands 186Frank van Oort, Nicolas van Geelen and Helmut Thöle

Public Private Partnerships – Pursuing adaptive qualities in spatial projects 212Frits Verhees and Jos Arts

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Land and property development in times of crisis – Choosing the right governance strategies 228Erwin van der Krabben and Peter Ache

Complex patterns of self-organized neighbourhoods 242Jenni Partanen and Anssi Joutsiniemi

Coalition Planning: Working on the interface of institutions and networks – directing, partnering and facilitating 260Martine de Jong

EPILOGUE

Epilogue 264Luuk Boelens and Gert de Roo

References 275Contributors list 306

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