Beyond the Plan; Towards a New Kind of Planning

Abstract

Although recently much has been done to improve planning both operationally and practically, spatial planning and urbanism are still dictated by the old Cartesian way of approaching the world. Reality however has taken on an enormous flux. Next to the space of places, we need to deal with the space of flows too. Next to economic global dimensions, we also need to deal with social, cultural and political fragmentation and reclustering processes on a local level in several ways. In this article, initial arguments are given on how planners and urbanists could possibly deal with these ongoing multi-dimensional worlds in space and time: fluviology. It is a plea for a more actor-oriented approach in efficient networks of surprising reciprocal fragments of mutual interest, for more consistant interchange between theory and practice and for associative democracy beyond the plan. The article is therefore accompanied by a few recent planning examples and planning experiments in the Netherlands.