Applying Principles from Complex Adaptive Systems
Theory towards Urban Planning Strategies
A test case that replaces the design of urban objects with the choreography of urban processes….
Sharon Ackerman, PhD Candidate, Spatial Planning
Background:
-  Urban Design Background (North American)
-  Interested in what Complexity thinking can add to
cities (life and resilience!)
-  Try to understand generic processes in CAS
-  Translate CAS principles for design
-  Interest in relational processes that occur by means of
design interventions, rather then preceding design
interventions
Presentation:
- Discussion of Relational strategies that use principles
of complexity as understood in European Planning
Literature
-  Discussion of Design Tactics that employs relational/
complex processes for design unfolding in space
-  ʻThought Experiment'
(competition entry for Winnipeg, Canada)
Complexity and Relational Processes adopted in planning
(representative approaches):
- Healey: Communicative
-  Batty: Computational
-  Hillier: Post-Structuralist/Assemblage
Emphasis on Discourse, Story-Telling and the complexity of
the social agents that are implicated in spatial politics
- “not
a
more
adequate
theoriza/on
of
space,
but
instead
a
theoriza/on
of
spa/al
rhetoric
and
of
spa/al
imagining
as
this
forms
the
core
of
a
spa/al
poli/cs”
‐
Malpas
Spatially Enacted Complex Unfolding – a few samples….
PopUpHood, Oakland
-  1 vacated city block
-  6 months free rent
-  7 start up businesses
Low risk entry into the market place plus critical mass. Spatially Enacted Complex Unfolding
ʻPlay me Iʼm Yoursʼ : Pianos, Toronto
-  41 pianos distributed around the city
-  impromptu concerts, sing-a-longs, gatherings
-  activation of underused urban sites
Pianos act to probe the latent social capacities of various
sites.
Spatially Enacted Complex Unfolding
Pop Rocks, Vancouver
-  Large scale bean bag chairs distributed along one city block
-  umbrellas
- Invites citizens to ʻsocialize, rest, eat or read a book in the
heart of downtownʼ
Spatially Enacted Complex Unfolding
-  Raw/Almond Restaurant (architecture gallery/restaurant)
-  1 frozen river, 1 table for 20
-  3 weeks, 3 settings per night -  Minus 30 degrees Celsius
Occupying the frozen Red River and changing the perception
of winter activity in the city.
Common Orientation:
ʻLighter, Quicker, Cheaperʼ (LQC- Eric Reynolds)
(also called Tactical Urbanism)
Common Traits:
-  Create Juxtapositions: novel spatial connections
-  Probe Lightly: low investment, failure acceptable
-  Explore Widely: get feedback on ʻfitʼ configurations
Competition Entry: Portage and Main, Winnipeg
-  Design for key civic intersection
-  Pedestrians had been pushed underground by barricades
-  Surrounding areas suffering from lack of pedestrian activity
-  Many vacated sites, surface parking lots, boarded shops
Team saw the problems of the intersection as being driven by
relational factors that implicated the downtown as a whole.
Site Analysis:
7 x 7 x 7:
Spaces =
Niches
Programs=
Species
Days = Iterations
Generative
Matrix
Iterations and Feedback loops that support fitness evolution
- Intersections of the matrix act as probes of fitness potentials: Saturday in July + Streets to claim + Urban play = Urban beach
What this planning strategy could offer…
-  speeds up the evolutionary capacity of cities by generating
possibilities
-  failure is an option!
-  lots of tests means chances of finding good strategies (and
entrenching those)
-  provides a way to get around bureaucratic ʻlock-inʼ by
creating a pathway to creative city uses
-  information about the relative fitness of interventions is
provided at a high level of resolution due to being enacted
rather than forecasted
Sharon Ackerman, PhD Candidate, Spatial Planning
Questions?
‘
The
task
of
city
planning
has
become
less
one
of
producing
the
simple
order
of
‘ra/onal’
urban
plans,
but
one
of
how
best
to
generate
and
maintain
the
func/onal
complexity
–
or
complex
func/onality
–
tradi/onally
possessed
by
ci/es…The
somewhat
paradoxical
challenge
of
planning
then
becomes
one
of
how
to
‘plan’
a
kind
of
complexity
that
seems
to
have
arisen
‘naturally’
in
tradi/onal
ci/es,
without
planning.’
‐
Stephen
Marshall
2012
Sharon Ackerman, PhD Candidate, Spatial Planning