Beyond Blueprints? Adaptive Governance and Metropolitan Spatial Planning

by Cathy Wilkinson

On the 8th October 2002 Melbourne’s most recent metropolitan strategy, Melbourne 2030 – planning for sustainable growth, was released followed an almost ten year formal and informal experiment exploring the relevance of complexity theory to metropolitan spatial planning and governance.

To cut a long story short (Wilkinson in submission) this exploration resulted in three changes to the way Melbourne’s metropolitan planning had been done since 1929:
- ‘adaptability’ was included as one of seven guiding principles (alongside the usual suspects of ‘sustainability’, ‘innovation’, ‘equity’ etc.)
- a much broader range of non-traditional governance mechanisms were identified (Niven and Wilkinson 2005) in recognition of the uncertainties and complexities of achieving transformative urban change
- the role of ongoing monitoring and adjustment of the implementation program towards desired trajectories in face of unintended consequences was included as one of nine ‘key directions’.

As the Executive Director responsible for Melbourne’s metropolitan planning, I thought we had made significant progress in putting the past century’s linear ‘command and control’ style approaches to spatial planning and governance behind us. Until 8th October 2002. Guess what the single most common descriptor of Melbourne 2030 was and has been from that fatal day of release on by politicians, stakeholders and the media - a blueprint!

Almost without exception, metropolitan strategies aspire to transformative change. Through Melbourne 2030 we wanted to double public transport patronage, significantly reduce water consumption and reverse urban sprawl. A blueprint as you most probably are aware is literally a reproduction of an engineering technical drawing. Not much use for governing towards transformative change in complex adaptive systems like cities. And this was just one of several examples of the way linear legacies and the desire for certainty continued to plague the ongoing strategic planning process in Melbourne.

So whilst I realize that adaptive management/co-management/governance has enjoyed success transforming natural resource management approaches (Olsson et al 2006) I believe there is still a long way to go when it comes to evolving management approaches for linked social-ecological urban systems. Given the importance of urban systems to planetary environmental conditions (Grimm et al 2008, Newman et al. 2009) it seems important to unpack how the politics of certainty/uncertainties affects attempts at adaptive governance in urban settings.

Why isn’t there an equivalent history of success for adaptive urban governance? Why has urban planning theory only recently begun to (tentatively) consider such approaches (Hillier 2008, Murdoch 2006)? How does adaptive urban governance differ from incrementalism (Lindblom 1959) that has been heavily critiqued in the planning literature? And of perhaps most relevance for this blog, what insights can adaptive governance provide for sustainable urban governance and what challenges does sustainable urban governance raise for adaptive governance?



References

Grimm, N.B et al (2008) Global change and the ecology of cities, Science 319:756-760

Murdoch, J. (2006) Post-structural geography, Sage

Newman et al. (2009) Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, Island Press

Niven S. & Wilkinson, C. (2005) ‘Reinventing Melbourne’ in Charlesworth, E. (ed) Cityedge: case studies in contemporary urbanism.

Wilkinson, C. (in submission) ‘Harnessing Urban Complexity - Reflections on the implications of a complexity approach to metropolitan planning from Melbourne, Australia’, Hillier, J. et al (eds) (forthcoming) Complexity and Planning, Ashgate