Complexity and uncertainty: problem or asset in decision making of mega infrastructure projects? Salet, W.; Bertolini, L.; Giezen, M.

Planning through processes of "co-creation" has become a priority for practitioners, urban activists, and scientific researchers. However, urban development still shows a close instrumentalism on goal-specific tasks, means, and outcomes despite awareness that planning should enlarge possibilities for social change rather than constrain them. The article explores the dilemmas of planning agency in light of the contemporary need to open spaces for innovative practices. Planning is understood as a paradox; a structural tension between organization and spontaneity. The article provides a detailed profile of three specific dilemmas stemming from this condition. We distinguish and conceptually explore the dilemmas of intervention, regulation, and investment in current practices. The article provides a specific understanding of today's planning dilemmas, exploring the key notions of "space and time" in the intervention dilemma, "material and procedural norms" in the regulation dilemma, and "risk and income" in the investment dilemma. We suggest that planning practice today needs to make sense of these dilemmas, navigating through their extremes to find new contextualized forms of synthesis.

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Current practice in decision-making about mega projects seems to be aimed at reducing complexity by simplification. However, this is often detrimental to the resilience and added value of these projects. This article uses the concept of strategic capacity for analyzing the decision-making process on mega projects. This concept consists of three elements: strategic ambiguity (the tension between different purposes and goals), redundancy (having more options than necessary from an efficiency perspective) and resilience (is the process reactively or proactively resilient to outside demands?). Two transport mega projects in the Netherlands are analyzed. Our analysis demonstrates that creative solutions and added value are to be found in the recombination of policy options made possible by enhancing strategic capacity.

ABSTRACT. The paradigm of adaptive governance is paramount in policy discourses on the mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate change. Adaptability, resilience, and cooperative approaches are promoted as the appropriate vehicles to meet the contemporary conditions of uncertainty and complexity. We claim that the legitimacy and effectiveness of these responsive strategies might be augmented via the use of legal perspectives. Rather than the instrumental use of command and control type of regulation, the legal perspectives should focus on establishing principal norms that enable the search for different solutions in different contexts. From these assumptions, the concept of legal obligation is explored as embodying the meaning of legality, and at the same time conditioning and committing the probing of different ways of purposeful action in different local circumstances. We explore the innovative potential of legal norms and demonstrate how responsive strategies to climate change can be guided by the contextualization of legal norms.

Spatial policies for the city-regions of Europe have to be formulated in increasingly complex conditions. These conditions are outlined in the first part of the article. It is argued that the key for a successful policy response is in the organization of connectivity between the domains of the private sector, the internal regional policies, and the transregional policies. However, city-regions exist within different institutional settings, and organizing connectivity has to adapt to such differences. The article constructs a typology of these varied institutional settings based on research of nineteen European city-regions. Each type of institutional framework has its particular risks and opportunities, and these need to be taken into account in generating the appropriate form of informal planning strategy and maximum connectivity.

Adaptation to climate change necessitates serious adjustments to the spatial organization of our environment. However, the uncertainties, the controversial character of the climate debate, the variety of climate change consequences and the inherently complex character of climate change puts specific demands on adapting spatial planning to climate change. Due to these characteristics of climate change, climate adaptation demands "adaptive spatial planning". One of the main challenges is to balance between a robust and a flexible approach. On the one hand adaptive spatial planning tries to enable social and economic functions to flourish. On the other hand flexibility is required in finding creative combinations between the fulfillment of climate adaptation and other spatial interests. In this article we reconsider the strategic departure points for spatial planning (norms, values and principles), the interactive organization of planning processes, and the allocation of responsibilities, costs and benefits in planning processes which in our view constitute adaptive spatial planning practices in the context of climate change.

Introduction: the rationale Changes in social, economic, and spatial patterns of urban regions over recent decades have led to polymorphic urban landscapes and new perceptions of city-regional spaces. Cities are evolving physically and functionally through external interactions into dispersed and multinuclear urban configurations that are quite distinct from the traditional urban hierarchy. With processes of urban transformation still unfolding, new perceptions of coherence and identity at the city-regional level have not yet crystallised. Many urban regions are reevaluating quality-of-life issues (economic, social, cultural, and environmental qualities) in the unsettled and fragmentary context of the emergent landscapes. These initiatives are part of a wider`cultural turn' in planning, understood as planning that makes reference to the cultural sense of a place (Montgomery, 1990). We define culture as shared codes of meaning or common sense. Cultural symbols are the objects, projects, metaphors, and so on that refer to a certain way of life (Geertz, 1975;Keesing, 1974; Swidler, 1986).An increasing range of stakeholders, from planners and urban designers to private sector developers and civic groups, are marking processes of change in symbolic ways in order to profile the ongoing transformation of cities. A variety of symbolic expressions is generated to accentuate the transition processes, such as the shaping of highly visible landmarks and design objects, the use of linguistic tropes (in particular metaphors) in strategic frames of planning, the expression of cultural markers in marketing strategies, the highlighting of new public spaces, the occurence of major urban manifestations and public events, and so on. The initiatives intend to enhance the social meaning (ie to amplify or magnify its meaning and create something more than is now apparent) of the transforming spaces in day-to-day perception by employing symbolic markers of change. Metaphors of planning and design (such as the Pearl River Delta symbolising the coherence of the metropolitan region of Hong Kong, Shenzen, and Guangzhou or the Flemish Diamond symbolising the polycentric city network in Flanders) and cultural landmarks (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,