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Complexity, complex systems and complexity theories are becoming increasingly important within a variety disciplines. While these issues are less well known within the discipline of spatial planning, there has been a recent growing awareness and interest. As planners grapple with how to consider the vagaries of the real world when putting together proposals for future development, they question how complexity, complex systems and complexity theories might prove useful with regard to spatial planning and the physical environment. This book provides a readable overview, presenting and relating a range of understandings and characteristics of complexity and complex systems as they are relevant to planning. It recognizes multiple, relational approaches of dynamic complexity which enhance understandings of, and facilitate working with, contingencies of place, time and the various participants' behaviours. In doing so, it should contribute to a better understanding of processes with regard to our physical and social worlds.
Public administration as a field of study finds itself in the middle of a fluid environment. The very reach and complexity of public administration has been easy to take for granted, easy to attack, and difficult to explain, particularly in the soundbite and Twitter-snipe media environment. Not only has the context for the discipline changed, but the institutions of public administration have adapted and innovated to deliver services to the public and serve those in power while becoming increasingly complex themselves. Has public administration evolved? And what new lines of research are critical for effective policy and delivery of programs and public services while preserving foundational ...
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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. How does governing work today? How does society (mis)handle pressing challenges such as armed violence, cultural difference, ecological degradation, economic restructuring, geopolitical shifts, global pandemics, migration flows, and technological change in ways that are (not) democratic, effective, fair, peaceful, and sustainable? This volume addresses these key questions with reference to the theme of 'polycentrism', i.e. the idea that contemporary governing is dispersed, fluct...
Creating Ecological Value is a timely contribution that matches recent trends in innovation economics suggesting that an evolutionary notion of system innovations and a sector-specific industrial dynamics perspective are a suitable analytical framework for the way in which firms address sustainability challenges through innovation. Marcus Wagner, University of Würzburg, Germany We cannot expect to solve the environmental problems we face today by narrowing our focus on single firms. We need to think more systemically. In his book, Creating Ecological Value, Frank Boons takes on this challenge. While his research begins by exploring the diversity of environmental strategies adopted by compan...
This ground-breaking Encyclopedia provides a nuanced overview of the key concepts of urban and regional planning and design. Embracing a broad understanding of planning and design within and beyond the professions, it examines what planners and designers can do in and for a community.
Why is it that many large public projects run out of control in terms of scope, budget and time? How can it be explained that urban regeneration programs are highly successful in one neighborhood but fail to deliver in an adjacent neighborhood? Why is it that public policies can return unexpected and sometimes even unwanted outcomes, despite meticulous planning? Why is public decision-making such a complex affair? The world is an erratic place, full of surprises, some of which are wanted and others are unwanted. Public decision-making in this world is like punching clouds: considerable energy is put into the punching but the cloud goes its own way, despite the punches. Recent ideas and insig...
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Advances in public management sciences have long indicated the empirical finding that the normal state of public management systems is complex and that its dynamics are non-linear. Complex systems are subject to system pressures, system shocks, chance events, path-dependency and self-organisation. Arguing that complexity is an ever-present characteristic of our developed societies and governance systems that should be accepted, understood and adopted into management strategies, the original essays collected in this book aim to increase our understanding of complex governance processes and to propose new strategies for how public managers can deal with complexity in order to achieve high-qual...