The Idea of a Pyramid of Planning Institutions Should Be Avoided

　　John Friedmann

　　Founding Professor of the Program for Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at UCLA

　　Keywords: Urbanization, Mega-Conurbation, Complexity Theory, Coordinated Development, Urban Planning

　　1. Complexity Theory and Mega-conurbation

　　Over the past 30 years, three major urban regions emerged in coastal China. Each is composed of multiple city centers that over time have grown together. I call this process of growing together “a fusion of urban horizons,” the outcome of which is a new form of the urban habitat of unprecedented size and demographic density. In English, a term for this new form is mega-conurbation. “Conurbation” is actually an old word originally coined by Patrick Geddes (1854～1932), a Scottish geographer and sociologist who is known as one of the “fathers” of urban and regional planning. He applied this term specifically to city regions that are composed of multiple urban centers.

　　This growing together of urban centers is not only a physical phenomenon of built-up areas but a relational one as well: over time, these city centers become interconnected through high-speed transport linkages, telephone connections, electronic devices etc. along with the necessary infrastructure to support them. From a functional perspective, therefore, a conurbation begins to act as an integrated unit or system. In China, the Pearl River Delta(PRD) is one such urban system composed of around 80 million people. The Yangtze Delta (YD), with its 30 cities, is even larger, comprising a population of perhaps 130 million.  And the population of the new “super-city” of Beijing (BTH), encompassing multiple millions, falls somewhere between the PRD and the Yangtze Delta. Mega-conurbations are thus hyper-complex systems, by which I mean that their functional interrelations constitute a non-linear system of unprecedented size.

　　2. Complexity Theory and Spatial Planning

　　As a field of studies, urban planning has only recently become aware of “complexity theory” whose origins took shape decades ago. One of the leading theorists of urban complexity is Professor Michael Batty of the London University College. Professor Batty is a modeler of cities, however, and urban modeling is essentially a reductive exercise, good for research but not so much for practice, which must deal with real cities and what amounts to in “real time.”  Planning practitioners have only recently become interested in viewing cities as complex socio-spatial and technical systems, and most of them are located in northwestern Europe. Two well-known urban systems analysts who are also practitioners are Geert de Roo and Ward S. Rauws. They are rethinking the way planning is being done in the Netherlands by taking complexity into account.  North American academic planners have so far shown relatively little interest in the subject.

　　When you say that complexity is understood differently in different disciplines you are of course right. As a profession, planners are late comers to this subject and so far, haven’t given much thought to the study of cities as systems or more precisely, as open and adaptive systems. There are several reasons for this. Systems analysis either requires a reductive approach, such as in modeling, or else is overwhelmed by massive data, which take forever to sort out. There was a brief period in the 1960s, when planners—particularly transportation planners--were interested in systemic approaches to urban studies, and hence to planning. But at that time their models were hugely expensive and failed to provide reliable results. Michael Batty recently published a small article on his web page about what happened then. He writes:

　　“40 years ago, Douglass B. Lee published his notorious article “Requiem for Large Scale Models” in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners on the demise of the first generation of urban computer models in the United States. In it he identified seven ‘deadly’ sins of modelling: defining these relative to our understanding of cities at that time and the technologies used to implement the models as: Hyper-comprehensiveness, Grossness, Hungriness, Wrong-headedness, Complicatedness, Mechanicalness, and Expensiveness.”

　　According to Batty, Lee’s article effectively spelled the end of modeling cities or urban transportation systems, at least in the US. But today we are conversant with “smart cities” and “big data,” the modeling of cities with real and even current information is coming again within the realm of possibilities, and interest in the topic is growing. Even so, I find that the gap between planning practice and theory—and models are a form of theoretical construct--has yet to be closed. For now, it merely remains only a possibility.

　　My own take on urban complexity in planning is actually quite simple… perhaps too simple. It is that planners are largely ignorant of the future. Based on alternative assumptions, they can make linear projections of certain variables, but non-linear projections as a basis for planning decisions are not yet possible. If this is the case, we are forced, I believe, to limit planning to what I call the “extended present.”

　　3. Hyper-complexity and Chinese Planning

　　I would more or less agree with that. As planners we can, of course, have visions of the distant future, conjuring up images of what we would like to see happen, ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. But we should not confuse these wish-images with knowledge that has scientific merit. They are no more than imaginaries of the future that may or may not inspire us to action but beyond that have little merit. Actually, I believe that we are ignorant not just of the longer range but also of the existing state of the city (and even more so, of the existing state of any given mega-conurbation).  A starting point for arguing in favor of this hypothesis is to ask a fundamental question: If the city is a constantly evolving open system of immense size, what can planners claim to know about the actual state of this system and its future? It turns out that virtually everywhere we look, the data available to planners is quite limited. Most of what we know comes either from recent censuses, from other public sources, or from special surveys and researches, which are rarely carried out to meet planners’ needs. By the time this information falls into the hands of planners, most of itis already historical! Remember that an annual seven percent GDP growth rate as in China implies a doubling every ten years. Events happen faster than we can record them! Censuses are held every decade, supplemented perhaps by occasional sample studies from some period in the recent past. Under conditions of rapid change and non-linearity, this information quickly gets out of date. Furthermore, who guarantees the accuracy of these data? There are numerous reasons why the data planners have in hand may have very little relevance for charting the city’s future. And that’s only part of the story. The other part is making sense of such data as you do have so that you can be confident that you have at least a working hypothesis of the city when describing its patterns and future tendencies.

　　I would argue that planners not only in China but in Europe and elsewhere, face a situation of radical uncertainty. Imagine, for instance, that you are a planner hired by the City of London. One morning you wake up, watch the news, and—wow-- it’s Brexit! How can you plan for a London whose future in the present perspective is so opaque? Such unanticipated events are not uncommon. And that’s why I have suggested refocusing planning on the extended present, which is to say, on a period of five years at most, using such data as you have from the most recent past. Anything beyond this period is essentially terra incognita, an unknown land.  Planning decisions, it turns out, are actually quite risky and on shaky grounds.

　　（文章来源：City-IF城市规划云平台）