ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of relational complexity as a crucial interpretative framework enabling relational/collaborative planning to produce alternative spatial and governance imaginations. The Gilles Deleuzean analysis of the EW story highlights some crucial weaknesses underlying the concept of relational complexity. It contrasts the relational complexity perspective with a Deleuzian understanding of the multiple dynamics shaping places in order to explore its potentialities in freeing creative energies by avoiding the reproduction of existing oppression and marginalization. Such exploration is carried out by mapping the social cartography of one of the many governance processes inspired by the relational complexity which, despite being considered a success, failed at imagining alternative urban developments and reproduced existing exclusions. Thus, at the risk of trivializing the Deleuzean thinking, the chapter uses the social cartography to analyse one the many governance processes which by following the relational complexity perspective excluded alternative spatial and governance imagination.
