ABSTRACT
The largely mechanistic epistemologies employed by strategic spatial planners have in the past regarded phenomena as ‘objects which must be taken apart, abstracted and packaged into propositional statements in an instrumental manner’ (Tsoukas 2005: 220). Such an ‘if x, then y’ approach to strategic planning, which binds the future to the present, is redundant at the beginning of the twenty-first century and I, like many other authors, argue for a turn to what is increasingly being referred to as post-normal thinking and practice.1 This might well entail ‘a reinvention of the ways in which we live’ (Guattari 2000: 34) and plan: ways in which politics, economics, society and space are imagined, not as something ‘out there’ – contexts for planning practices – but as processes through which relations are constructed, entangled and disentangled. (See also the Introduction to Part One of this volume.)
The chapters in Part 3 of this volume all develop notions of relational complexity, including fragmented and folded conceptualisations of actants, including space, and demands for spatial planning theory and practice to be creative and experimental.
