Having talked to a few complexity & planning scholars at the AESOP conference and also to some Turkish urban scholars researching complex planning issues I wondered if the former community might want to turn their attention (collectively or individually) to a particular complex problem faced by the latter. An issue that crops up time and time again in turkish planning - as just about everywhere else where there is fast growth, sprawl and haphazard government control over urban development - is the timing and sequencing of population and services/infrastructure. There are two extreme outcomes:
1. People locate first, services follow
2. Services locate first, people follow
There is an equivalent problem and two extreme outcomes for (a) the fixed costs of urbanisation - ie hard infrastructure and (b) the variable costs ie urban services.
Between the two extremes are a range of hybrid outcomes, depending on prevailing market and governance dynamics, capital supply etc.
RESEARCH QUESTION: Can any general rules be constructed concerning this problem? For example, is the outcome less or more unpredictable (a) at different spatial scales (volumes of people)? (b) temporal scale (slow/fast urbanisation)? (c) with different kinds of feedback channels (clarity of market signals or degree of monopoly in the retail or education markets for example).
What can complexity science say about this central planning issue? Wouldn't it be good if members of this list and of the AESOP complexity group addressed themselves to bringing light to a classic urban planning problem and thus advancing the science of our profession?
Chris Webster
|