Transformative Practice as an Exploration of Possibility Spaces

• Published in: Complexity and Planning pp. 93 - 114
• Main Author: Van Wezemael, Joris E.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2012
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Heterarchic Modes; Virtual Diagram; Complex Systems Theory; Rank Size Distributions; Possibility Spaces; Empirical Illustration; Port Authorities; Dissipative Self-organization; Vice Versa; ABM; Cellular Automata; Van Wezemael; Urban Heat Islands; Real Estate Companies; Non-profit Housing Developers; Exterior Relations; Non-ergodic Systems; Large Scale Urban Models; Complex Adaptive Systems; De Roo; Erasmus University Rotterdam; Public Administration; Space Time Geographic Information Systems; Incremental Drift
• ISBN: 1138109584; 9781409403470; 1409403475; 9781138109582
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315573199-5

The quantitative paradigm dominated the field of urban research during most of the 1950s and 1960s just to be replaced, in the early 1970s, by social theory oriented urban studies. The social theory oriented Structuralist-Marxist and Humanistic (SMH) urban studies have adopted postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstruction approaches, while the quantitative urban sciences were strongly influenced by theories of complexity and self-organization. Similarly to cities, one can describe the history of planning in terms of a pendulum that is moving between two poles that correspond to Snow's two cultures: a qualitative descriptive study of city or urban or regional or environmental planning, versus a quantitative analytic science of planning or regional science as it is often called. Most researchers in the domain of CTC preferred and still prefer to focus on rather traditional, conservative and somewhat anachronistic urban issues: central place theory, land use, rank-size distributions of cities, national systems of cities and the like issues that were dominant in the 1950s and 1960s.