Track 16 COMPLEXITY AND FUTURE TRANSITIONS

Track chairs: Peter G Ache, Christian Lamker, Thomas Machiels, Katharina Dienes

Planning is confronted by complex socio-spatial, ecological, technological, and political challenges and needs to engage more explicitly with futures: how they could be, how they might become, and what enables or constrains their realisation. Transformative planning works with communicative practices like storytelling, visioning, and scenario-building, through which narratives shape understandings of change and pathways towards it. Simultaneously, rapidly evolving conditions, including technological convergence and AI, shifting global agendas, and the growing agency of cities and metropolitan areas, are transforming planning contexts.

This tension is particularly evident in the transition towards more sustainable, equitable, and resilient forms of territorial development. Contemporary spatial conditions oscillate between dystopian trajectories, marked by segregation, polarisation, inequality, authoritarian tendencies, and ecological degradation, and renewed forms of urban and territorial agency, including collective action, community building, democratic innovation, post-growth approaches, and real-world experiments with alternative futures. We are at a critical juncture in which complex and insufficiently understood systems can be redirected towards more sustainable pathways, including transitions from grey to green and blue infrastructures and environments.

The track invites scholars and practitioners to explore how planning can navigate and shape such uncertain transitions, with particular attention to the implications of complexity, emergence, experimentation, adaptability, and self-organisation for planning, as well as to the role of e.g. sensing, designing, imagination, or dreaming in expanding the field of the possible. We encourage contributions grounded in real-world settings that critically examine established narratives, norms, institutions, and routines, while exploring new approaches to planning and designing. The aim is to exchange theoretical, conceptual, and empirical insights into how planning can contribute to just, inclusive, sustainable, and transformative futures. A part of the track will run as a workshop on a local case in Birmingham (more information to follow) where we will seek to learn from each other how to create different futures. 

Keywords: Changing mindset, narratives, utopia, futures, sustainable pathways, imagination, complexity, systems approaches, emergence, self-organisation