The Idea of a Pyramid of Planning Institutions Should Be Avoided
— John Friedmann on the Urban Complexity Theory and Regional Planning
JF =John Friedmann,NX=徐南南
INTRODUCTION
John Friedmann is recently intrigued by the complexity theory and the concept of mega-conurbation.His current research is on urbanization processes with special reference to China. In this interview, he talked about the concept of mega-conurbation, the complexity theory’s implication for planning, the relation between planning and politics, comments on Chinese planning, planning education, and the development of spatial planning system. He expressed his expectations for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development and Xiong’an NewArea. He thinks that the highest level of regional governance should avoid the hierarchical plans, and he proposed his idea of the tri-level planning for mega-conurbations.
01 Complexity Theory and Mega-conurbation
NX: I noticed that you are recently interestedin the complexity of urban systems. You termed the large Chinese city groups, such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze Delta, and Pearl Delta, as hyper-complex urban systems (or conurbations). Could you tell me why you like to use this notion?
JF: Over the past 30 years, three major urban regions emerged in coastal China. Each is composed of multiple city centers that over time have grown together. I call this process of growing together “a fusion of urban horizons,”the outcome of which is a new form of the urban habitat of unprecedented size and demographic density. In English, a term for this new formis mega-conurbation. “Conurbation” is actually an old word originally coined by Patrick Geddes (1854~1932), a Scottish geographer and sociologist who is known as one of the “fathers” of urban and regional planning.He applied this term specifically to city regions that are composed of multiple urban centers.
This growing together of urban centers is not only a physical phenomenon of built-up areas but a relational one as well: over time, these city centers become interconnected through high-speed transport linkages, telephone connections, electronic devices etc. along with the necessary infrastructure to support them. From a functional perspective, therefore, a conurbation begins to act as an integrated unit or system. In China, the Pearl River Delta(PRD) is one such urban system composed of around 80 million people. The Yangtze Delta (YD), with its 30 cities, is even larger, comprising a population of perhaps 130 million. And the populationof the new “super-city” of Beijing (BTH), encompassing multiple millions, falls somewhere between the PRD and the Yangtze Delta. Mega-conurbations are thus hyper-complex systems, by which I mean that their functional interrelations constitute a non-linear system of unprecedented size.
NX: Can youexplain more about non-linearity? By non-linearity, do you mean something growsexponentially?
JF: No, it’s not the exponential growth (or decline) of a pluricentric urban system but its indeterminacy. Amega-conurbation evolves in unexpected, unpredictable ways as a result of the myriad feedback loops, both positive and negative, that characterize the internal structure of the system and its response to external flows of information, whether caused by nature such as earthquakes or by changes in monetary flows and financial crises or technical interventions. Of course, the spatio-technical systems that define the conurbation are also path-dependent,which means that its growth path has a certain stability.
02 Complexity Theory and Spatial Planning
NX: Systems analysis and complexity theory are well known in China. These terms occur in government and party documents quite often, as if everybody could understand them. Unfortunately, their definitions are vague and varied across disciplines. Can you explain how you define them in the context of spatial planning?
JF: As a field of studies, urban planning has only recently become aware of “complexity theory” whose origins took shape decades ago. One of the leading theorists of urban complexity is Professor Michael Batty of the London University College. Professor Batty is a modeller of cities, however, and urban modeling is essentially a reductive exercise, good for research but not so much for practice, which must deal with real cities and what amounts to in “real time.” Planning practitioners have only recently become interested in viewing cities as complex socio-spatial and technical systems, and most of them are located in northwestern Europe. Two well-known urban systems analysts who are also practitioners are Geert de Roo and Ward S. Rauws. They are rethinking the way planning is being done in the Netherlands by taking complexity into account. North American academic planners have so far shown relatively little interest in the subject.
When you saythat complexity is understood differently in different disciplines you are of course right. As a profession, planners are late comers to this subject and so far haven’t given much thought to the study of cities as systems or more precisely, as open and adaptive systems. There are several reasons for this. Systems analysis either requires a reductive approach, such asin modeling, or else is overwhelmed by massive data, which take forever to sort out. There was a brief period in the 1960s, when planners—particularly transportation planners--were interested in systemic approaches to urban studies, and hence to planning. But at that time their models were hugely expensive and failed to provide reliable results. Michael Batty recently published a small article on his web page about what happened then. He writes:
“40 years ago, Douglass B. Lee published his notorious article “Requiem for Large Scale Models” in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners on the demise of the first generation of urban computer models in the United States. In it he identified seven ‘deadly’ sins of modelling: defining these relative to our understanding of cities at that time and the technologies used to implement the models as: Hyper-comprehensiveness, Grossness, Hungriness, Wrong-headedness, Complicatedness, Mechanicalness, and Expensiveness.”
According to Batty, Lee’s article effectively spelled the end of modeling cities or urban transportation systems, at least in the US. But today we are conversant with “smart cities” and “big data,” the modeling of cities with realand even current information is coming again within the realm of possibilities,and interest in the topic is growing. Even so, I find that the gap between planning practice and theory—and models are a form of theoretical construct--has yet to be closed. For now, it merely remains only a possibility.
My own take on urban complexity in planning is actually quite simple… perhaps too simple. It is that planners are largely ignorantof the future. Based on alternative assumptions, they can make linear projections of certain variables, but non-linear projections as a basis for planning decisions are not yet possible.If this is the case, we are forced, I believe, to limit planning to what I call the “extended present.”
03 Hyper-complexity and Chinese Planning
NX: What are the implications for planning practice when we realize the hyper-complexity of Chinese urban regions? I am personally intrigued by your notion of “planning without facts”. For me, this implies: 1) planners should not be over-confident and invested in the plans they made; 2) governance capacity building, including the reform of planning institutions, is an endless process; 3) actors in civic, public, and business society shape plans in interactions on the one handand, on the other, adjust their own reactions. Planners should recognize and embrace this reality because in this process the particular plan making accumulates inputs from various angles and evolves to become a sort of technical consensus.
JF: I would more or less agree with that. As planners we can, of course, have visions of the distant future, conjuring up images of what we would liketo see happen, ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. But we should not confuse these wish-images with knowledge that has scientific merit. They are no more than imaginaries of the future that may or may not inspire us to action but beyond that have little merit. Actually, I believe that we are ignorant not just of the longer range but also of the existing state of the city (and even more so, of the existing state of any given mega-conurbation). A starting point for arguing in favor of this hypothesis is to ask a fundamental question: If the city is a constantly evolving open system of immense size, what can planners claim to know about the actual state of this system and its future? It turns out that virtually everywhere we look, the data available to planners is quite limited. Most of what we know comes either from recent censuses, from other public sources, or from special surveys and researches, which are rarely carried out to meet planners’ needs. By the time this information falls into the hands of planners, most of itis already historical! Remember that an annual seven percent GDP growth rate as in China implies a doubling every ten years. Events happen faster than we can record them! Censuses are held every decade, supplemented perhaps by occasional sample studies from some period in the recent past. Under conditions of rapid change and non-linearity, this information quickly gets out of date. Furthermore, who guarantees the accuracy of these data? There are numerous reasons why the data planners have in hand may have very little relevance for charting the city’s future. And that’s only part of the story. The other part is making sense of such data as you do have so that you can be confident that you have at least a working hypothesis of the city when describing its patterns and future tendencies.
I would argue that planners not only in China but in Europe and elsewhere, face a situation of radical uncertainty. Imagine, for instance, that you are a planner hired by the City of London. One morning you wake up, watch the news, and—wow-- it’s Brexit! How can you plan for a London whose future inthe present perspective is so opaque? Such unanticipated events are not uncommon. And that’s why I have suggested refocusing planning on the extended present, which is to say, on a period of five years at most, using such data as you have from the most recent past. Anything beyond this period is essentially terra incognita, an unknown land. Planning decisions, it turns out, are actually quite risky and on shaky grounds.
NX: In China, the planning law requires comprehensive planning to project not only in 5 years but also to predict in 20 years. How should we do with this 20-year scheme? Should we just present it as a vision? By vision I mean it is more to present people’s common will than to draw conclusions from data.
JF: That’s a good question. Actually, 20-year projections are imaginings rather than scientific conclusions drawn and ed by data or even theories. Are they an expression of people’s “common will” as you say? To the extent that the CCP speaks for the people, I suppose you could call it that, even though “the people”—local citizens—have not been consulted. But the 20-year vision could also be presented as a series of alternative options based on different assumptions. At any rate, visions need to be revisited every few years to see whether they are still valid.
NX: As for the question to what extent the plans expressthe people’s “common will”, I have acomment from the institutional perspective. According to the urban and rural planning act, plan-making authorities are required to consult the public for at least 30 days and to submit the draft and public comments to local parliament for review. They have to bring inputs of the public and the legislature as well as their responses to supervisory authorities for approving the plan. I would say the spirit and procedural requirements of the planning law do encourage planning to be an expression of people’s “common will”, but to what extent the law is enforced varies across places and situations. Besides, I think more elements of public participation should be incorporated into the planning institutional framework.
Back to the very question of the function of a 20-year scheme, if it is more about imaginings rather than scientific conclusions, planning seems to play a role of shaping the public discourse about the future. In another word, it generates terms and ideas for people to use in discussion about what actions they should take to meet the coming challenges. One may argue that planning is only useful when it is based on scientific studies; to them this kind of planning is useless. But for others, shaping the public discourse could also make big differences. I think planners should be aware of this point of view, especially in the time of planning in the hyper-complexity.
According to my observation, the trend planning plays the role of discourse-shaping is more obvious in the 5-year plans than in the urban and rural plans. As the state has much less control over the economic and social realm, the economic and social development 5-year plans (FYP) have become more like a “communicative document” from the state to the private sector and civil society about what and how the party and the government plan to do. The thirteenth FYP guideline states clearly at its beginning:
“The 13th Five-Year Plan sets forth China’s strategic intentions and defines its major objectives, tasks, and measures for economic and social development. This plan is to serveas a guide to action for market entities, an important basis for government inperforming its duties, and a common vision to be shared among the people of China.”
The thirteenth FYP embodies a lot of new terms and some ideas seem to be advanced, if not unrealistic. Many of these terms and ideas gain popularity in the public discussion. Maybe some of them would be practical in five years, who knows!
How would you comment on the function of planning as discourse-shaping? Does it echo your idea of“planning without facts” in hyper-complexity conurbations?
JF: You make an interesting argument. This is actually a question that could be studied empirically. Whose discourse is being shaped? And does a five-year planactually shape the discourse of urban planning? Or the 20-year plan? I remain skeptical.
NX:Yes. This begs the question of what planning can do and really does. It is a huge issue to be researched and discussed. However, planning surely does something, doesn’t it?
JF: Luckily, most planning endeavors are small-scale and incremental. Whether they concern a new sub-division, a major shopping mall, construction standards, dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster such as anearthquake, imagining a new tourist development, dealing with complaints from local neighborhoods, and other things of this sort, planners can usually manage them without much difficulty. But when you try to give shape to the future of a largely self-organizing urban system which has the dimensions of a mega-conurbation, you run into difficulties. This is why such decisions tend to be made by politicians rather than planners. In China’s case, this means the CCP. The Party is ultimately accountable to the people, and is thus the proper institution for engaging in visionary initiatives.
NX: I agree with your comments on the dichotomy of planners and politicians. But an important question in planning theory is the relationship between planning as techniques and planning as policy-making and thus as political. Do you think Chinese planners who mostly work for the public sector should and could remain “apolitical,” doing what politicians command them to do?
JF: At some point, what is technical and what is political run together. In my view, at the appropriate level,planners should argue for what they think is the most prudent course of action and present their arguments to the political authorities who are responsible for making major policy decisions. I see this as a moral obligation of planners. But once a decision has been made, planners need to carry them out, whether they agree with it or not. Or they can quit. The exit option is always there.
But back to your previous question. Inthe early days of the Reform period, planning was still a relatively simple matter. You were building new cities from the ground up. It was just a matter of deciding where to build the future city, then to design it, and finally to construct it. All you needed was a blue print. But now, with so much of China’s built environment already in place, with over half a billion citizens, and the first generation of buildings ready for renewal, things are becoming much more complicated. The quality of urban life is becoming a major issue, and solutions are more difficult to devise.
04 John on Chinese Planning Education, Regional Planning, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region and Xiong’an New Area
NX: What are yours uggestions for Chinese planners to be prepared for this transformation?
JF: China’s planning schools have been turning out planners for the first three decades of China’s Reform period. They now need to rethink their curriculum to reflect the new realities as we move into the third decade of the21st century: continuing economic growth but at lower rates as China’s economy matures, a greater emphasis on quality of life and sustainability, a deeper understanding of planning at the level of local communities or neighborhoods, a more communicative planning…these sort of issues seem to me to be important. But I really can’t be more specific.
NX: And what recommendations would you like to offer for the planning of Chinese hyper-complex urban regions?
JF: I hesitate to make recommendations that addresses specific urban issues in China. But a more general answer, applicable wherever mega-conurbations exist, which is mostly in Asia, there are three levels where planners are active: at the level of the mega-city region itself, at the level of each central city that makes up the conurbation, and finally at the level of local neighborhoods.
Let me begin at the lowest level, the neighborhood. Any urban intervention will affect local neighborhood life somewhere. People have a vested interest in how their neighborhoods evolve, that is, with the quality of local life. It seems reasonable, therefore, that neighbors are involved in decisions that will affect their quality of life and the value of their properties.Throughout Asia,there are already existing neighborhood movements that want to be part of any change that will impact their lives. Citizen participation is therefore desirable, which means that local people will want to be consulted. At a higher level of involvement, neighborhood organizations seek empowerment to take such local measures that will improve the conditions of local life. It seems to me that duly certified neighborhoods could be given financial and/ or material resources to spend on local improvement projects that fall within a certain range of expenditure.There usually is much that could be done locally that would not otherwise occur, from small parks, to recycling and garbage collection, recreation facilities, mini-parks, intersection safety, bicycle paths, and so forth, having in mind the diversity of interests found within the community: the elderly, women, youths, handicapped individuals, etc. A place to start would be to study already existing examples of neighborhood activation in Asia, beginning in Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, as a start.
As regards the second level, China already has a good instance that also connects directlyto the third level of the mega-conurbation as a whole. I refer to the Yangtze Delta Mayoral Economic Cooperation Organization, which was founded in 1996. I don’t have much information about this institution, but it seems tome it would be worthwhile to draw on its experience to devise similar organizations elsewhere to involve all of the central city planning bureaus of the pluricentric region for the purpose of coordinating their respective initiatives.
At the first or mega-conurbation level ofdecision making, establishing a coordinating body such as the Yangtze Delta Cooperation Organization would seem to be a first priority. It is at this level, too, that other initiatives could be taken, such as a long-term visioning exercise for the conurbation as a whole. This imaginary could provide a continuing influence over local decisions and generate a great deal of excitement as various alternatives are explored. Beyond this, basic research on the state of the mega-conurbation and its component parts should be made a high-level priority, perhaps in cooperation with the research institutions at various universities and research organization of the region. Finally, the regional organization could be responsible for in-service training programs of planning and administrative staffs of the many planning organizations already in existence. This too could be done in conjunction with local universities. In short, the highest level of regionalgovernance would not so much impose hierarchical plans as to encourage research, training, debate and discussion of issues related to the evolution ofthe mega-conurbation by engaging the existing capabilities of universities and research arms within the region. The idea of a pyramid of planning institutions should be avoided. At the same time, a strong base or foundation at the neighborhood level could be encouraged.
NX: Currently, the party central and the state council proposed to build the “Xiong’an New Area” in Hebei province. It is acrucial initiative in the BTH coordinated development plan. Basically it is going to give Hebei province a “development pole” to attract people and resources from Beijing, perhaps to a less extend, and Tianjin. I know you havebeen engaged in many regional development works across the globe. Besides the idea of complexity and its implications for planning, what else ideas or successful cases you would like to suggest for Xiong’an?
JF: I have no information about Xiong’an New Area, and I understand that the matter is still under discussionby the relevant authorities. Of course, China has shown that it can build the physical infrastructure of new cities in record time. But whether this will be a “development pole” as you say or primarily a residential and office space remains to be seen. But whatever its role, Xiong’an will be just another part ofthe pluricentric mega-conurbation of BTH. Since nothing definitive has as yet been decided, there is an opportunity to experiment with a new urban form and architecture, and to ensure that the new area will also work in human terms, not just to please the architectural gaze of the planners. Building it in stages also would seem to be a good idea so that certain urbanistic theories can be tested in the process,and allow experimentation on how vital neighborhoods can be evolved. Whether Xiong’an will actually attract people and institutions from central Beijing is a hypothesis that will have to be tested in practice.