ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses issues of causality, controllability and planning capacity. I explore the resilience perspective linked to system thinking and how the idea of complex adaptive systems (as self-steering system) goes together (or not) with the resilience perspective being used to raise controllability. Exposing contradictions within the system perspective of resilience as being complex and self-organising on the one hand and resilience as being something that can be installed is at the heart of this chapter. I argue that most work on resilience and on complex systems is based on the idea that if we better understand how these complex systems work, we would still be able to control the system and plan for better resilience. The chapter shows that these two perspectives cannot be united and that one consequence might be a decoupled understanding of the resilience machine from system thinking. Rather, understanding resilience as a normative political concept must be advanced if we are to adequately plan for issues within urban and regional development.
