Fluid Planning: A Meaningless Concept or a Rational Response to Uncertainty in Urban Planning?

Abstract

Many contemporary writers have developed and elaborated upon various fluid metaphors to capture aspects of contemporary social life (Urry, 2000).Flows and fluidity are some of the catchwords in social, cultural, and urban thinking that is used as building blocks in theorizing contemporary trends with a focus on process, connectivity, and mobility at the expense of the previous focus on boundedness, hierarchy, and form (Simonsen, 2004(Simonsen, : 1333)).Fluidity and flows could even be seen as a whole new paradigm (Shield,1997).In the social science literature these consepts are primarily used as metaphors to describe turbulence and instability.Also in the planning field, fluidity is a concept that first of all is used as a metaphor to describe conditions of uncertainty.Today's turbulent conditions represent particular challenges for planning and policy making, including new spaces of politics, radical uncertainty, awareness of interdependence, the importance of "difference," and dynamics of trust and identity (Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003).Strategic spatial planners are faced with a world of potentialities, possibilities and uncertainties that are mostly beyond their control (Hillier et al., 2011).Traditional strategic spatial planning practices are failing to cope with contingency and uncertainty.In the planning literature, fluidity is however, more than a metaphor.The conditions of radical uncertainty also call for new forms of planning that in a sense are fluid too.Situations of uncertainty require a form of planning that is more exploratory and open to change; planning could be more equivalent to a "voyage of discovery" rather than a "road map" (Balducci, 2011: 2).The collaborative planning tradition is the most straightforward form of planning that addresses some of these challenges.Among the main characteristics of this tradition are openness, transparency, dialog and consensus building (Innes and Booher, 2003;Healey, 1997;Forester, 1999).Collaborative practices may represent a new sort of institution emerging that can take many shapes and forms but also have shared characteristics: they are fluid, evolving, networked and involves dialogs and distributed intelligence (Healey et al., 2000).A more radical answer, very distinct from collaborative planning theory can be found within the emerging post-structural, multi-planar theory of planning, developed by Jean Hillier (2007).In her book "Stretching beyond the horizon", Hillier argues that planning has to be open to what www.intechopen.com

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