Artificial Planning Experience

Abstract

In Chaps. 2 and 11 we discussed the disillusionment of modern urban and regional planning following its attempts at the ‘Taming of the Shrew Environment’ (Portugali 1995). That is to say, the failure of modern urban and regional planning to solve urban problems and control cities by means of the scientific method and rational planning Our interpretation was that one reason for this failure is misappreciation, on the side of planning theory, of the nature of cities and metropolises as self-organizing systems: A central property of such open, complex, far from equilibrium, systems is that they are unpredictable and thus uncontrollable; and yet, predictability, control and ‘social engineering’ are the pillars of modern town and regional planning. In light of the above the major question in Chap. 11 was: ‘in the absence of predictability and control can there be a meaning to planning? ’ In Chap. 11 we answered this question in the affirmative and started to outline a new, self-organization, approach to planning. In this chapter we further elaborate on this new approach by illustrating how our FACS models from Part II can be designed and used as heuristic planning tools. The specific model we use for this purpose is City-1 as developed in Chap. 6.

With Itzhak Benenson