Fluid Planning: A Meaningless Concept or a Rational Response to Uncertainty in Urban Planning?
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: 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 may come: “We need to re-invent planning as a strategic future-oriented
activity, taking into account the unknown, open up for new possibilities, towards
a planning as becoming instead of planning as fixing” (Hillier, 2007: 17).
Hillier suggest that spatial planning practice requires redefinition and a new
theoretical foundation if it is to be relevant to the dynamic complexities and
contingencies of the modern world (Hillier, 2008:259). According to Hillier,
the task is to move from “what is” to “what if” (Hillier, 2007: 17). A momentum
of experimentation could then be seen as a kind of “virtual planning” that
focuses especially on “the unknown” (Hillier, 2007: 232) in a time of
“contingent openness” (Hillier, 2007: 224). This kind of planning is largely
concerned with “possibilities” and “what ought to be” (Albrechts, 2005:
265–266), and may be seen as an argument for a more fluid form of planning.
What is the basis for these ideas
about fluid planning? Can fluid planning be anything more than a vague idea or,
at best, influence architectural projects by bringing new and exciting ideas
about urban design towards realization? Is it possible to identify the borders
between mainstream planning and forms of fluid, experimental planning? In what
planning situations is a fluid “approach” relevant and is it possible to
imagine fluid planning as a practice? These questions are tricky, with an
ambition that is far from mainstream planning rationalities. There will be
tensions between the experimental and the regular, the fluid and the fixed. The
idea in this chapter is to address the above questions through a review of the
literature on fluid, open, and contingent planning. The aim is to elaborate
further on the concept of fluidity in a planning context, asking whether it is
useful and where it takes us. The chapter will search for forms of evidence of
fluid practices in the planning field. The chapter is divided into six
sections. The next section addresses the concept of fluidity in the social
sciences, seeking to identify its roots and how it has been conceptualized. The
third section attempts to distinguish between different dimensions of fluidity,
as can be extracted from the planning literature. Four different forms of
fluidity are discussed: fluidity as a particular form of uncontrolled space;
fluidity as a planning condition of radical uncertainty; fluidity as a norm;
and fluidity as potentiality and chance, as momentum from which planning can be
re-invented. The fourth section addresses fluidity in urban planning. The fifth
section illustrates aspects of fluid planning through a case study of an urban
planning project that has been called “The Tromsø Experiment.” The final
section sums up and discusses some critical aspects of the concept of fluidity
in planning.
The metaphors of “flow” and
“liquidity” have recently captured the attention of social theorists concerned
with emergent social processes in a world perceived as being increasingly
disorganized and complex (Sheller, 2004; Bauman, 2000; Castells, 1996).
Castells speak of “space of flows,” and Urry of “global fluids.” Zygmunt Bauman
talk about liquid modernity and suggests that there are reasons to consider
“fluidity” or “liquidity” as fitting metaphors when attempting to grasp the
nature of the present phase of the history of modernity (Bauman, 2000: 2). The
quotes below are examples of the elaboration of these concepts from some of the
most widely profiled social scientists.
“The ‘spatial concepts’ –
networks, flows, and fluids – are used as building blocks of a new orthodoxy of
the theorization of social life, a theorization that is argued to favor a focus
on process, connectivity, and mobility at the expense of an alleged former
focus on boundedness, hierarchy, and form.” (Simonsen, 2004: 1333)
“Flows
have direction but no purpose. They are intentional but not purposeful or
teleological. Similarly, flow is related to its own sense; it has no
transcendental meaning or direction. It is not flowing to any specific place.
Analytically, the differential of flow is a temporary, mathematical reduction.
For example, a curve, mathematically differentiated yields a degree of change
of direction. The flow metaphor is used to signal the qualities of motion,
materiality, and viscosity.” (Shields, 1997: 3)
“... The new lightness and
fluidity of the increasingly, mobile, slippery, shifty, evasive and fugitive
power.” (Bauman, 2000:3)
“The network concept involves
flows of people, information, and money within and across national borders.
Flows and networks – defined as ‘sets of interconnected nodes’ are then
conceived of as universal organizational principles, be it of infrastructure,
companies, finance, information, or media.” (Castells, 1996)
“Governance is no longer only
about government but now involves fluid action and power distributed widely in
society.” (Innes and Booher, 2004:11)
“Places can be loosely understood
as multiplex, as a set of spaces where ranges of relational networks and flows
coalesce, interconnect and fragment. Any such place can be viewed as the
particular nexus between, on the one hand, propinquity characterized by
intensely thick co-present interaction, and on the other hand, fast flowing
webs and networks stretched corporeally, virtually and imaginatively across
distances.” (Urry, 2000, p.140)
“Relational networks of connected
elements are inherently unstable and fluid. Society performs by recording,
channelling and regulating the flow of energies through such networks.”
(Thrift, 1996: 285)
“The idea of a gel of vicious
liquid implies fluidity, slipperiness, instability, movement and transformation
a form which nevertheless has the capacity for momentary stabilisation.”
(Hillier, 2007: 58)
“… smooth space is the fluid
space of light and becoming, and striated space is controlled.” (Hillier,
2007:65)
Fluidity
and flows in the social science literature are primarily used as metaphors.
John Urry, for instance, argue that in order to understand the new mobilities,
we need metaphors that “view social and material life as being like the waves
of a river.” Such fluid notions are necessary to capture the multiple
transformations of collective representations in which “collective relations
are no longer societal and structural” (Urry, 2003: 59). Another body of
literature is that of Appadurai and others who argue for the metaphors of flow,
uncertainty, and chaos (1996). Deleuxe and Guattari use the term “bodies in a
vortex” (1986). White characterize the social world as being constituted of
disorderly and sticky “gels and goos” (1992). Mol and Law, representing
Actor-Network theory, generally elaborate a fluid spatiality (1994). Social
movements can be described with similar metaphors; “they flow along various
channels but may overflow or ebb away or transformed into powerful waves”
(Urry, 2003: 71). This is illustrated in a contemporary setting on the
Internet, for instance through the Arabic Revolution in Cairo in January 2011.
Fluids are subject to mixtures and gradients with no necessarily clear
boundaries (Urry, 2003: 43), always moving and changing as they go. Fluids are
not solid or stable and relates to turbulence and rupture.
Particularly influential is the
network metaphor about society. Fluidity is often associated with the concept
of network. The “rise of the network society,” by Manuel Castells (1996),
grasps some of the transformations that have taken place in society with
consequences for planning and policy making. Castells write about spaces of
flows when describing the network society; the increasingly mobile,
technologically mediated spatial form that dominates contemporary capitalist
societies. Networks are not stable structures; instability is one of their
basic characteristics. “The network society should be conceived of as made up
of open or unstable structures that expand, readjust, shift and evaporate”
(Hajer and Wagenaar 2003: 5). Therefore, the shift in language from institutions
to networks implies a change from stability (institutions) to fluidity
(networks). Networks are seen as synonymous with flows. Another link can be
made to the theories of network governance, where the blurring of borders
between organizations is increasing, a consequence of which is increased
interdependence (Rhodes, 1996; Sørensen and Torfing, 2007). Stein and Harper
(2005) claim that complex, contested, and somewhat fluid boundaries between
public and private allow for creativity and innovation in the public
realm.
Fluid conditions could then be
related to society, to social relationships, and to governance relations.
Fluidity is used to illustrate instability, movement, uncertainty, complexity,
and something uncontrollable; this is, in contrast to stability, which is
static, fixed, ordered, and controlled.
From the planning field, fluidity
characterizes what Miraftab (2009), for example, called “insurgent citizenship”
practices – those radical planning practices that respond to neoliberalism:
“through the entanglement of inclusion and resistance they move across the
invited and the invented spaces of citizenship” (p. 35) (see also Sandercock,
1998). Graham Houghton and Philip Allmenninger also elaborate on fluidity in
their discussion of “soft spaces” in planning. They make a distinction between
hard and soft spaces representing two different approaches in planning; “Hard
spaces are the formal, visible arenas and processes, often statutory and open
to democratic processes and local political influence. Soft spaces are the
fluid areas between such formal processes where implementation through
bargaining, flexibility, discretion and interpretation dominate” (2007:
306).
In the tradition of pragmatism,
Patsy Healey (2009) and John Forester (1989) developed planning ideas based on
a focus on concrete problems in specific situations, joint development of
shared understanding of problems across multiple rationalities, and of actions
or policies upon which there is agreement. People learn by experience and by
interacting with each other, experimenting with ideas in real cases. Healey
stress the power of agency and the “unique situatedness of particular instances
of practice” (Healey, 2009: 444), as well as how agents and institutionalised
structural forces interrelate in complex networks. Pragmatists celebrated the
experimental, encouraging creative exploration and discovery (Healey, 2008).
Forester saw planners as “reflective practitioners” who, in their practice,
“learn about the fluid and conflictual, deeply political and always surprising
world they are in” (Forester, 1999: 26).
Post-structuralist approaches to
planning theory and practice, which Jean Hillier deal with in particular, open
up considerations of profoundly important questions about strategic spatial
planning in the uncertainty that has increasingly been identified over the last
decade or so in scholarly publications. Hillier see planning and planners as
experiments that are “enmeshed in a series of modulated networked
relationships”(Hillier quotes Charles Laundry who suggests, “we need to look
into the sun, think at the edge, and cross boundaries.”(Landry 2006, cited in
Hillier, 2008:25). Hillier explores the potential of the concept of “becoming”
as creative experimentation, “where problems are not ‘solved’ once and for all but which, over the
‘lifetime’ of a strategic plan, are constantly recast by changing actors,
situations and preferences, to be reformulated in new perspectives” (Hillier,
2008a: 26). In a special issue of Town
Planning Review (Vol. 82/5 2011) on “Strategic Spatial Planning In
Uncertainty,” Hillier et al. raise questions such as “how might spatial
planners seek to affect and “manage” environments in undecidable situations?
Can we develop theories and practices which rely less on closure and more on
openness to possibilities and opportunities? How might we plan in situations of
fluidity and complexity?” (Hillier et al., 2011: 4). To Hillier, plans are
moments of stability, a temporary fixity, and spatial planning an experimental
practice. Hillier argue for foresighting, speculation, and experiments because
these methods entail thinking about futures that we may not be able to
recognize directly, futures that do not simply extend our current needs and
wants but may actively transform them in ways we may not understand or control
(Grosz, 2008: 260, cited in Hillier, 2008: 34). These futures recognize the
possibilities and potentials of a particular space. Planners are understood as
navigators positioned as “helmsman steering the city” (McLoughlin, 1969: 86, in
Wilkinson, 2011: 10). Such ideas have a lot in common with poststructural
theories of planning and geography, where the internationalization of flux and
instability is identified as a key navigational strategy available to negotiate
the “in-between” spaces (Murdoch, 2006: 97). The main notion of relational
geography is the performance of social practices, and the performance of space
goes hand in hand; they are both entangled in the heterogeneous spatial
processes of becoming (Murdoch, 2006: 18).
The table
below summarizes and lists some of these theoretical inspirations to the
concept of fluidity.
|
Theoretical
inspirations |
Relational
geography |
Poststructural
philosophy |
Social
theory |
Actor-network
theory |
Multi- Planner
theory |
Neopragmatism
|
|
References
|
Massey,
Amin
and Thrift,
Murdoc |
Deleuze and Guattari.
|
Beck, Castells,
Urry |
Law,
Mol, Latour |
Hillier |
Healey,
Forester |
|
Concepts
|
Spaces
of flow, the in-between spaces |
Rhizome,
Trajectories, Lines of flight |
Liquid moder- nity, Network
Society
|
Heterogeneous
networks |
Fluid
planning, planning as experimental practices |
Creating
explo-ration and discovery |
Table 1. Some theoretical
inspirations to the concept of fluidity in urban planning.
Fluidity then is more than a
metaphor. In summing up the conceptualization of fluidity in the social
sciences it might be useful to distinguish between fluidity as, 1) an ontology,
2), as epistemology, and 3) as a certain form of practice. Fluidity in its
ontological status is related to a post-structural view of a world of flows,
where the reality is fluid, temporary and always in the making. In this fluid
ontology the world (and the city) is conceived through an ontology of process
and potential, through the work of networks of enrolment, fluid-like flows, and
multiple encounters (Amin and Thrift, 2002). As an epistemology, fluidity
refers to the radical uncertainty of a world that has become too complex, but
still something that can be and has to be managed. Planning means in this
setting to control uncertainties and fluidities (Abbott, 2005). Fluidity as a
form of practice could in a planning context be understood as a more
experimental planning practice that is more open and transparent towards future
possibilities (Hillier, 2007). In the next section, these aspects of fluidity
will be elaborated. Fluidity is also much related to what has been labeled
“fuzzy planning” in some of the literature on urban and regional planning (De
Roo and Porter, 2007).
What does fluidity actually mean
in a planning context? Planning may become fluid when there are no solutions to
a problem, when the problem itself is complex, fuzzy or “wicked”. In this
section, we will distinguish between four forms of fluidity. Fluidity may be
understood first, as a particular form of space,
second, as a planning condition.
A third understanding is when fluidity becomes a norm, something that might be encouraged. The most common
understanding of fluidity, however, is when it is related to planning
experiments, as a potentiality, a chance, a momentum
from which planning can be re-invented.
Fluidity as a particular space
The most obvious form of fluid
spaces in a planning context is exemplified by Kim Dovey in his book “The Fluid
City” (2005). The fluid space is here represented by the Melbourne Docklands
Waterfront, which focused on the transformation of this industrial space into
“fun-space”; the waterfront constructions, perhaps the most commodified spaces
in any modern city. The Dockland case is also an example of a fixed, limited
place with a clear identity that becomes something else through the re-facing
of the city to the water (Dovey, 2005:2). More interesting, however, is fluid
space understood as non-regulated space, freezones, liminal space, and
border-zones. Border-zones (the area on both sides of a national border) are
spaces in which cultural identities are blurred. Some borders are fluid,
multiple, intersecting, and not fixed (Aure, 2011: 174), while others are
highly controlled and regulated. In contrast to regional space, which is
defined by drawing boundaries around clusters of objects, practices, or people;
and networked space, which is defined by the form of relation between entities;
fluid space is defined by boundaries that come and go, allow leakage, or
disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without practice
(Mol and Law, 1994: 643). Fluid space is defined by a lack of clear boundaries,
being defined by liquid continuity and gradients rather that binary identities.
Another
form of fluid space are ‘temporary urban spaces’, spaces that for different
reasons have avoided regulation and not given a particular function and
therefore open to more creative use, open spaces for political action, leisure,
or other purposes, for instance cultural expressions (Haydn et al., 2006).
Temporary spaces provide an experimental opportunity for an urban platform for
democratic action and human expression. Haydn encourages planners to look
beyond the city’s fixed boundaries so that citizens can participate in the
creation of temporary spaces, rather than being automatons in fixed spaces that
planners negotiate with private development (Mayo, 2007). Temporary spaces
cannot be planned, which lead the authors to conclude that these spaces are
politically freer than interim uses, which are easily appropriated uses that
sustain the political economy.
A similar concept is what Groth
and Corijn (2005: 503) call “indeteriminate spaces,” that is “spaces left out
of ‘time and place’ with regard to their urban surroundings, mainly as a
consequence of rampant deindustrialization processes.” Interminate spaces have
an unclear status, representing a sort of “no-man’s-land, which may allow for
the emergence of a nonplanned, spontaneous urbanity. Groth and Corijn relate
indeterminate space to Lefebre’s concept of “differential space,” which is
“created and dominated by its users from the basis of its given conditions. It
remains largely unspecified as to its functional and economic rationality,
allowing for a wide spectrum of use which is capable of integrating a high
degree of diversity, and stays open for change” (Groth and Corijn ,2005: 521).
The qualities of the “indeterminate” spaces (Groth and Corijn, 2005), which
Sandercock saw as a form of “insurgent urbanism”, “embraces uncertainty as
potential space of radical openness which nourishes the vision of a more
experimental culture, a more tolerant and multifocal one” (Sandercock, 1998:
120).
According to Groth and Corijn, in
such places that are not coded by marked-led urban development, distinct
possibilities for practices of innovation and playful intervention arise. Such
indeterminate spaces cannot be completely planned, because if they are, they
lose their fluid status, and thereby also their creative potential. To survive
they depend on the investment of informal actors that occupy these spaces.
A more metaphoric use of space is
the concept of “smooth space” elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), who
distinguish it from “striated” space. Striated space is strict and stringent
space, stable points of order, while smooth spaces are spaces without
boundaries, the spaces of “becoming.” Smoothness implies slipperiness and
movement, where one slides seamlessly from one site to another. These are not
to be understood as real spaces, but tools for thinking about space; every real
space will be a combination of smooth and striated space. The urban waterfront
in transition is an example of a smooth space, a boundary between the stable and
striated space of the city, and the smooth flows of the water (Dovey, 2005:
24).
The issue here is how to plan in
situations of fluidity and complexity, when planning is like “walking in the
mist.” Today’s planning problems are often quite open-ended, which raises the
question of what kind of knowledge is relevant in a society that is in “a state
of flux”. Several planning theorists have grappled with new ways of thinking
about strategic spatial planning in connection with coping with issues such as
the unknown (Abbott, 2005), fluidity, and dynamic diversity (Healey, 2007). The
fluid is related to the unexpected, uncertainty, contingencies. Fluidity and
uncertainty go hand in hand, and uncertainty is seen as a “danger” to planning (Sandercock,
2003) as well as to planning politics (Flyvbjerg, 1991). While flexibility may
be an advantage, it also means a lack of certainty, such as for investors,
changing the rules of the game through the process, etc. Uncertainty may lead
to manipulation, holding back vital information, and distrust; this situation
characterizes many contemporary urban development processes.
However, planning has always been
related to handling and reducing uncertainty (Abbott, 2005). Fluidness, on the
other hand, is more than just handling uncertainty in the sense of a lack of
knowledge about the future or not being able to control the tools needed to
manage the situation. Radical changes in the way humans interact with their
social, financial, and natural environments have led planning theorists and
practitioners to increasingly discussing spatial planning in conditions of
radical uncertainty (Christensen, 1985, 1999; Hillier, 2005).
The world in which strategic
spatial planners attempt to plan is littered with potentialities,
possibilities, and uncertainties, most of which are beyond their control. It is
this “radical uncertainty” that paves the way for discussions about fluid
planning. Such planning work involves “taking risks, the consequences of which
can be thought about, but cannot be known” (Healey, 2008: 28). Traditional
ideas of an orderly and hierarchical planning system that mobilizes resources
according to planned or projected events hold little conviction in an age of
simultaneity and juxtaposition, the contiguous and the fragmented, the
anticipated and the unpredictable. Many problems are simply too complicated,
too contested, and too unstable for schematic, centralized regulation (Forester
1999). Politics and policymaking are made in new spaces, which operate in an
institutional void; there are no pre-given rules that determine who is
responsible, who has authority over whom, or what sort of accountability is to
be expected (Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003: 9).
In planning, fluidity is also
treated as a norm that is related to open-ended processes, continuous
transformation, and planning as speculation and becoming. A situation of
fluidity may destabilize established discursive frames and routines and open up
new connectivities and opportunities. Destabilizing releases energy and focuses
on the dynamic forces present in every urban planning context, rather that the
stable, fixed aspects. According to Dovey, planning should include “a proactive
context,” whereas “flexibility is built into the planning schemes” (Dovey,
2005: 134). Dynamics and fluidities are emphasized in contrast to the static
geography of modernist strategic plans. Dovey also call for more fluidity.
Proposals and decisions are expected to be “accompanied by affect-laden discourses”
because cities “produce new desires and identities through the planning process
itself” (Dovey, 2005: 211). According to Louis Albrechts (2006), the need for
strategic plans to produce a competitive city necessitates a more fluid,
generalized spatial structure to allow for the insertion of major private
sector initiatives.
From the experiences of
collaborative dialogues, Innes and Booher (2003) claim that a new sort of
institution is emerging that is fluid, networked, and involves dialogue and
distributed intelligence. These institutions “are more like the standing wave
that keeps its shape while millions of molecules flow through it” (Innes and
Booher, 2003: 57). These institutional forms reward experimentation,
risk-taking, and new ideas. Healey et al.’s concept of “institutional
capacity,” which also relates to the concept of fluidity, is better understood
as a complex, fluid, and evolving infrastructure that flows at deeper levels.
“New elements and relations coexist, combine, and shatter as they encounter
older ideas and ways of going on” (Healey et al., 2003: 86).
A fourth
conceptualization of fluidity is to see it as a momentum: a situation in which
what has been taken for granted about “good” planning politically is destabilized,
which unsettles the apparent fixity of formal planning processes and calls for
alternative strategies.
In its place, ideas of planning
as a deliberately open and fluid process may be introduced as a response to the
complex and plural field of stakeholders and interests involved in public
planning and urban development, and where a condition for mobilizing new
energies and setting new directions into motion occur. A momentum can be
understood as what Buitelaar et al (2007) refer to as rupture in an
institutional path: “During rupture there is scope for path-breaking and
path-creating forms of action, when there is sufficient pressure, whether
internally or externally driven, a “critical moment” for change arrives
(Buitelaar et al, 896). A critical moment may turn into a critical juncture
encompassing a break with past patterns, inducing the overhaul of discursive
hegemonies through which institutional transformations may occur” (Burch et al,
2003).
Here, spatial planning becomes a
field of experimentation, where tools are frequently based on communication and
the involvement of actors rather than the top-down imposition of goals and
policies. Hillier’s theory explores the potential of the concept of “becoming”
as creative experimentation. Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
(Hillier, 2007: 76), Hillier claims that experiments do not seek solutions, but
instead ask the question “what comes next?” after the “contingent encounter” of
an experiment. To Hillier, an experiment is “a transgression of boundaries”
that works with “doubt and uncertainty” and pays attention to “the aleatory and
chance” (Hillier, 2007: 230). A momentum of experimentation could then be seen
as a kind of “virtual planning” that pays special “attention to the unknown”
(Hillier, 2007: 232) in a time of “contingent openness” (Hillier, 2007: 224).
As a particular situated human action, experiments are performative practices,
searching into an openness without knowing where it ends, but aware of the
possibility of the openness and fluidity of the situation, experimenting with
and experiencing “how it works” (Hillier, 2008: 4). According to Hillier, the
task should be “to test out ... how different innovations may perform in
different spatio-temporal circumstances” (Hillier, 2007: 250). This is not in
order to “fix” things, but rather to “test out” how to work with uncertain,
temporary and open circumstances, because there are “always too many unknowns
to give certainty” (Hillier, 2007: 250). To Hillier, experimentation involves “connection,
interaction and duration – lines of flight that might involve new experimental
discourses and new understandings of place” (Hillier, 2007: 281). A momentum,
then, is a situation of instability, of unstable forces that can be shattered
by a lack of decisive and ruling power, a lack of hegemonic discourses,
|
Characteristics/ Dimensions of fluidity |
Particular
space |
Condition
|
Norm
|
Momentum
|
|
Examples
|
Indetermined
space, Free-zones, Borderzones, Soft spaces, In-between
space, Smooth
space, Temporary
spaces |
Contingencies,
Complexities, Dynamic diversity,
governance |
New connectivities and energies |
Critical
moment, Windows of opportunity, Planning as experimentation, |
Table 2.
Four dimensions of fluidity.
because they intervene in what
Dovey saw as a future vision. Or, as Laws and Rein put it, “These moments of
doubt are precisely the moments when systems are open to new insights, ideas
and behaviour” (Laws and Rein, 2003:175). Any floating situation and fluid
planning process shapes experiments, and experiments have the potential to
influence the direction of progress. The strategic incentives to use such
openings as opportunities to gain control combined with the cognitive
tendencies to remove the irritation of doubt to make scarce those moments in
which doubt is available and something new is really possible. Such moments
create a “liminal space” (Shields, 1991; Hetherington, 1997) which open the way
for reflection and reframing.
The forms of fluidity could even
be extended beyond these four. For instance, fluidity could be related to the
context of planning. Philip Allmenninger and Graham Haughton (2007) pointed at
the fluid scales and scope of UK spatial planning, referring to the contested
and fluid nature of both regions and the scalar complexity of the roles of the
planning authorities. Gerd De Roo and Geoff Porter discuss the fluidness and
fuzziness in planning. Planning concepts and doctrines, such as sustainability,
participation, urbanism, and the compact city, are essentially fuzzy, fluid, or
illusive themselves, according to Roo and Porter (2007); they are concepts that
have multiple meanings. Fluidity could also be understood in the form of
dynamics: flows are spatial and temporal, but above all, material. They have
tempo and rhythm as well as direction (Shields, 1997: 2–3).
Cities, in particular, are spaces
of flows, dynamics, and multiple relations. They are increasingly structured
around flows of people, images, information, and money moving within and across
national borders (Amin and Thrift, 2003: 51). Amin and Thrift (2003) maintain
that circulation is one of the main characteristics of a city, saying “cities
exist as means of movement, as means to engineer encounters through collection,
transport and collation” (p. 81). Of course, cities are also ordered, but
according to Amin and Thrift, this ordering is “often exacted through the
design of flows as a set of serial encounters which construct particular spaces
over time” (p. 83). Amin and Thrift use fluid ontologies when practising an
urban theory based on “the transhuman rather than the human, the distanciated
rather that the reflexive” (2003: 5). The aim is to conceive of the world (and
the city) through an ontology of “process” and “potential”, through the work of
networks and enrolment, fluid-like flows, and multiple encounters. Cities are
seen as fields of movements and moments of encounter between spatially
stretched and distant connections. Some even talk about “fluid cities” in the
sense that they are dealing with “a confluence of flows of different forces”
(Dovey, 2005: 2). In what Healey defined as “the multiplex city” (Healey,
2000), she emphasized the diversity of the relations that transect urban areas,
and the complexity and unevenness of their inter-relations (Graham and Healey,
1999). The “networked” urbanism discussed by Graham and Marvin (2001) is one
articulation of the fluid social dynamics of cities. Space itself, particularly
urban space, is considered more complex, fluid, and fragmented. They describe
this fragmentation by referring to the “liquefaction of the urban structure”
and of the “splintered city” (p. 115) producing unstable fluid structures.
Throgmorten see cities and their planning-related organizations as nodes in a
global-scale web, “a web that consists of a highly fluid and constantly
changing set of relationships” (Throgmorten, 2003: 130). Even the process of
planning becomes fluid (Dovey, 2005). Cities as such cannot be comprehensively
understood and planned for, because their dynamics are too complex (Healey,
2007).
So how can one conceptualize the
complexities of urban dynamics, their openness to chance and their potential to
become otherwise? According to Boolens (2006), urban planning as a distinctive
area that uses a cautious approach to come up with proposals for the use of
urban space on the basis of well-defined and far-reaching view over time, is
outmoded. Contemporary urban planning is situated within this challenge:
seeking to control fluidity through either spatial plans and political
decisions seeking to tame critical voices and discourses by binding them to
binary hierarchies (for instance: reasonunreason, good-bad, real-unreal etc) as
well as to the discourse of spatial “answers” to the political need for a
‘comprehensible plan’. To Healey, the work of strategy formation becomes an
effort to create a nodal force in the ongoing flow of relational complexity
(Healey, 2007: 228).
To Dovey, the fluid city is both
a metaphor and a material reality. The material meaning has to do with the city
facing the water, as illustrated by the construction of the urban waterfront in
Melbourne’s Docklands. The metaphor of a fluid city is related to a city
becoming “unsettled”; an understanding of urban change as a confluence of flows
of different forces, both local and global. Dovey is inspired by Appadurai’s
ideas about the various global flows, which he term “scapes”: the “ethnoscapes”
(flows of tourists, refugees, and immigrants), “mediascapes” (flows of
information and images), “technoscapes” (flows of technology), “finanscapes”
(flows of capital) and “ideoscapes” (flows of ideas, values and ideologies)
(Appadurai, 1996).
Situated within discursive spaces
and the diverse forces of change cause planning to oscillate between fluidity
and ground. In facing these challenges, cities can try to ignore change and
tame criticism or, according to Hillier, they can try to make analytical
grounded flexible strategies. Hillier argue for post-structural urban planning
that focuses on “change, transgressions, contingency, temporality, fluidity,
immanence and emergence,” giving “an open-endedness of social contexts”
(Hillier, 2008: 25) that makes urban space to an aleatory field of meaning and
action. On the other hand, fluid planning could also mean “anything goes,” as
was the case in Melbourne’s Docklands, where the focus was entirely on flows of
capital and not at all on what it was actually becoming; in other words,
everything was fine as long as it sold and someone was willing to consume
(Wood, 2009). The problem with the Docklands planning process was not that it
was too fluid or ungrounded, but, according to Stephen Wood, “that it was not
ungrounded enough.” Its openness stopped with the capital, while the other
positive and productive forces and desires did not find their way through.
In many
cities, the failures of classical, modernist, comprehensive and rational
planning, and top-down governing schemes have opened the door for a new social
awareness, or rather uncertainty, regarding the best way to develop and govern
the city. In recent years, it has become increasingly important for cities to
be “open” to their multiple ways of living, diverse interests and ethnic
difference and to open up the planning process to “experiments” that involve
the public and stakeholders in new ways. Patsy Healey sees the challenge as
having two components: understanding the contingencies that make it appropriate
“to challenge fixities in one context and seeking to stabilize fluidities in
another” (2007: 15).
In order to illustrate how
fluidity way work in practice in an urban planning context, the chapter now
presents a case study of the “Tromsø Experiment” or, more precisely, “The City
Development Year” (CDY), a planning experiment that took place in this
relatively small city in northern Norway in 2005-2006. The formal planning
process related to a city centre plan was put on hold for one year. In its
place, planning as a deliberately open and fluid process was introduced as an
idea and as an answer to the complex and plural field of stakeholders and
interests that were involved. Openness often means losing control; indeed, the
situation becomes unpredictable and, in fact, in this case, no one was in
complete control of what happened the following year. This made a public space
for mobilizing new energies and setting new directions into motion. A fixed
planning process had, overnight, become a fluid one. Cities rarely have the courage
to make a “new beginning” and open up to the unexpected via multilateral
cooperation between city planning authorities, citizens, local businesses,
production, civil society, and professionals. Collective efforts risk ending in
“low politics” rather than competitive strategies. The Tromsø Experiment (the
CDY) was a year in which to experiment and to develop alternative ideas and
methods for a reformulated city center plan. Table 1 below summarizes the key
events and the fluidities of the experiment.
The
experiment allowed for new becomings by allowing the aleatory or chance to
occur, and stimulated the unexpected through new methods of participation,
mapping, discovering and sensing the city. With the citizens, the city was
investigated neighborhood by neighborhood, looking at how the form, meaning,
and social significance of space and place are dependent on the space’s past,
present, and imagined future. Contextual conjunctures were analyzed rather than
facts. The city was analyzed by highlighting the type of dynamics and driving
forces that were working in particular areas, and the rhythms of change to
which the areas were exposed. In some areas, for instance, there had been an
extensive “appartmentification” or gentrification. Questions were raised in each
quarter, such as “What is the history of this space?” and “What is its future?”
Other questions included, “What narratives have been played out here?” “What
emotions and stories are buried here?” “What is the relationship to the
surrounding streets and quarters?” and “What are the threats and what are the
possibilities?” People were invited to consider strategies for formulating
regeneration and transformation of the neighborhood. Each of these sociospatial
analyses was then put together, linked to maps and visualized. In the end, all
of the focus areas were presented as a “City Reader” that provided citizens
with a new way of reading about the city, or to give them an opportunity to
discover new aspects of the city through other concepts and perspectives.
|
Period |
Forms of fluidity |
Event |
|
1994 |
Experiments
with new forms of spatial planning |
The
concept of Tromsø as an architectural “experimental
zone” is introduced and the dialogic planning model, “The Tromsø Game,” is
developed |
|
1999 |
Ordinary
planning process |
The
planning administration starts the process for a new town plan |
|
2000– 2005 |
Public
debate - rupture |
The
City Forum arranges a number of public meetings on issues related to urban
planning and development |
|
February
2005 |
Formal
planning process are stopped |
The proposal for the new town
plan is due for its final decision-making by the planning committee |
|
March
2005 |
A fluid
situation occurs |
A last
public meeting on the proposal is held in the city and the “time out” is
introduced |
|
March 2005 –
March 2006 |
Experiments
with different forms of public participation, dialogs, planning discourses,
analyses, |
The
planning administration is removed from finishing the town plan and City
Development Year takes over the process, introducing a range of activities,
such as; Tromsø
X-Files (Expedition) City
walks, Feature
articles Public
meetings and seminars University
Conference Focus
group interviews Interactive
web-page |
|
April
2006 |
CDY
project ends |
The
City Development Year submits its report to the planning committee and ends
its activities |
|
June– August 2006 |
International
publicity |
The
experiment is presented at the Venice Biennale |
|
to 2007
|
Ordinary
planning process |
A new
town plan is finally completed |
Table 3. Overview of key events
of the fluid planning situation and the Tromsø experiment.
The Reader was primarily an
opening up to the ordinary citizens of the “black boxes” of planning, through
new ways of analyzing the city using a different rhetoric than formal plans
normally do. Terms like “appearing and disappearing city landscapes” and
“curing” were used to illustrate the degree of transformation and damage that
the different areas had undergone. Political and planning intentions and
considerations are often hidden in maps and texts, so the Reader also provided
citizens with insight into how planning works. Such methods can also make
planners more open about their intentions and their use of rhetoric. Although
the experiment departed from the traditional focus on the qualities of place
and governance, the planning discourse was, through the CDY, extended from a
formerly narrow focus on planning, architectural programs, and urban form,
towards an understanding of the city as a complex embodiment of everyday life processes
made of subjects and practices. This made it possible for the participants to
acknowledge that places are made of flows of becoming, and to realize the
significance of forces of the imaginary and desire as well as capitalism and
politics. The CDY committee and the way it performed was, in itself, an example
of networks, flows, and contingencies between formal and informal arenas. The
construction of the group with professionals from outside the planning
authorities makes this an example of a governance network (Nyseth, 2008), in
that it involved relatively stable, horizontal articulations of actors that
were interdependent but operationally autonomous (Sørensen and Torfing, 2007).
The committee’s performance and activities also constructed new networks and a
connection between actors that did not normally have contact with each other.
This new connectivity can be exemplified by the idea suggested by a narration
of a marine researcher, of a “marine fish market” at the harbor. The story
involved a visit from some Japanese colleagues who commented that it was
peculiar in a city that has fish as its basic industry that “it was not
possible to eat fish anywhere in the city at lunchtime.” This story led to a
project about the construction of a coastal food and adventure centre at the
harbor. In a rich fishing region, such a project is not exceptional, but it had
not been realized before, and it did occur through the opening and new
connectivities that had been created through the CDY. The fluid situation had created
new spatial and urban life connectivities. The publication of ideas from the
public also mobilized normative statements about, for instance, the need for
more collaboration in the city. Through a number of seminars and conferences,
webs of relations were established with other cities facing similar problems
and to the central level of government, which connected planners, sectors, and
other central participants in urban governance networks.
Through an exhibition called
Tromsø X-files and city walks, the city became an arena for potential ongoing
explorations by the citizens. Its ambition was to give citizens a unique
opportunity to get to know their city in a new way; that is, to take them on a
sensory journey through the city’s past, present, and future architectural and
physical landscape. Opening up planning in this way challenged the established
knowledge and practices of planning. It became more legitimate to ask questions
about what was going on, and especially the potential effects on planning
itself and future city development. This exhibition put almost all the new, but
not yet realized buildings and development projects in the city on display.
Even architects’ drawings and sketches of their ideas for new projects were
used. This enabled anyone to see not only one project at a time, but every
project arranged within its context; the surrounding buildings and quarters.
The exhibition made it possible to see what it would mean for the city as a
whole if all these projects were realized. A concrete model was produced of the
existing city, where some of the new projects were added, so everyone could
judge their potential effects on the city. Guided tours of the exhibition by a
member of the network or the planning office were arranged on a daily basis.
This exhibition represented the essence of the experiment, which one of the
members of the network expressed as: “To exhibit is to open up!” This slogan
became a brand for the ideology the CDY wanted to represent. In this context,
“opening up” refers to the number of new and unknown projects that were in
different phases of realization, including sketches on drawing-boards, and also
to the process and methods used to uncover the city’s “hidden future.” “Opening
up” also referred to critical dialogues between the project and the citizens,
which was one of the goals of the project.
So, from a situation where plans
had been more or less closed to the public, the new openness produced new
possible “lines of flight” concerning
conflicts and impasses. It was an experiment that moved contingency and fluid
planning into a political situation that could question the city’s hegemonic
planning discourse, not least because in charge of this experiment was a
network of professionals and “bricoleurs” independent of local government and
planning authorities (Nyseth et al., 2010).
Conclusion:
Does the concept of fluidity take us anywhere?
The metaphor of fluidity makes it
possible to move from the focus on fixed, ordered, and regulated landscapes and
planning as the tool to achieve this, towards exploring processes, flows,
movements, open boundaries, informal relations, etc. Fluidity is flexibility
and change; it is flows of money and desire; it is the formation of new
identities of both people and places (Dovey, 2005: 243). But the fluid is also
fragile; it can be there one moment and vanish in the next. To follow these
lines of thought, one needs to have a certain taste for the unknown.
It is rare for any city to look
for a truly fluid planning practice as part of its ordinary everyday planning;
instead it will seek a “temporary resting” (Healey, 2006) in which it tries to
regain an order of development, for instance, by looking for inspiration by
promoting debate on an “open situation” in urban planning and development.
Cities do not necessarily look for scenarios, rather for ideas about
contemporary forces of development to be dealt with and how to cope with them.
If cities were to have truly fluid planning, they could include, as in the case
of Melbourne, Australia: (1) a “future vision,” (2) “scribbles indicating
possible functional zones,” (3) a “collage creating composite pictures,” for
instance, by only working from (4) “a diagram presented as fluid blobs,” that
have (5) “no content” because the “fluid city” is only discursive (Dovey, 2005:
133– 134). Alternatively, as in the Tromsø case, this could be achieved through
openness, through inviting “bricoleurs” or “outsiders” into the planning
process, and through new discourses about urban planning.
In summing up this chapter, it is
necessary to raise some concern about the concept of fluidity. Fluidity may
have some advantages related to flexibility, openness and the production of new
ideas, but it also means destabilization, which could lead to a situation where
no one is in control. Dovey, for instance, expressed a deliberate ambivalence
towards the fluid conditions of urban development, saying: “there are values in
both ‘going with the flow’ and in resisting its place-destructive tendencies”
(Dovey, 2005: 5). The flows of desire for a better future are the very basis of
urban place-making, yet unregulated desires are also the source of urban
destruction. Fluidity also has connotations of uncertainty, difficulty, and
ambiguity. Too much fluidity, or fluidity going “wild,” would mean not only
losing control, but also, in a sense, giving up the ambition of steering, which
would certainly give other forces more room to maneuver. Questions about power
must be raised. Who gains and who loses in situations of fluidity? What forms
of power dynamics are played out when a planning process is “opened up to the
unknown”? Fluid conditions may marginalize civil society, giving too much power
to private investors. Therefore, there must be limits to fluidity. Decisions
have to be made and plans have to be adopted, which means stabilization and
fixity. On the other hand, in order for urban planning and democracy to become
alive, processes need to be open for the unexpected.
Fluidity, therefore, is a condition to which all cities must face up to. Like its opposite – “stability” – “fluidity in urban development is both good and bad” (Dovey, 2005). Fluidity and stability must be understood as a continuum; there is never complete fluidity or complete stability. There will be temporary resting, and at the same time moments, situations and spaces of temporariness which call for a new approach. The challenge seems to be how fluidity can be managed without losing control? There needs to be a form of institutional capacity that can translate the fluid moment into a strategy. The case study in this chapter has illustrated one form of control that was organized within a project with a strict time limit and accountability placed in the planning council. This might be a solution that worked in this case, but there may be many other models to develop. The role of public planning is perhaps not to control but to manage fluidity, to stand against the destructive forces of the marked as a mediator of public interests. But the “public interest” is also fluid as it consists of a multiplicity of interests that is never stable. Managing this ambivalence is perhaps the most difficult task that urban planning will face in the years to come.