Handbook on Planning and Complexity

The Handbook on Planning and Complexity deepens the scientific debate on planning and complexity considerably. The Handbook not only links planning as a science of purposeful interventions and complexity as a science of dynamic change and non-linear development. The Handbook also presents surprising new insights into complex urban behaviour that are highly relevant to understanding spatial development and to arrive at new types of spatial planning. The Handbook, for example, builds on the idea that cities show fractal-like structures and behave as complex adaptive systems, with non-linear developments, co-evolving trajectories and transformative forces. In such situations, planning interventions require new types of rationality and adaptive types of institutional design. This Handbook on Planning and Complexity responds to this with new perspectives, concepts, methods and tools. These include adaptive planning, non-linear types of rationality, governance and conditions, and different methods of experimental learning, all coloured with examples of complex urban behaviour.