Connectivity and contingency in planning

Abstract

The article argues that a defining feature of planning is its efforts at making, formalizing and expanding connections between events, functions and institutions. In the context of contingency, diversity and uncertainty that characterizes complex urban societies, spatial planning is an instrumental formal process that seeks to shape and manage the future of spatial conditions and relations. The planning process involves setting up a series of temporal, spatial and institutional connections, which, it is argued, have been subject to rupture, shrinkage and fragmentation, and so they are themselves contingent, and frequently limited to being symbolic rather than substantive connections, turning planning into a speculative process. To meet the future challenges, planners need to rethink these connections.