ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines key characteristics of present planning conditions and highlights the relevance of project-orientation and governance-modes of decision-making. It examines the core of Christensen's argument followed by a critical acclaim. The chapter aims at relating Christensen's degrees of complexity to the conception of degrees of freedom to generate a continuum of problem conditions in which generative processes vary in intensity and introducing possibility spaces to planning research to conceptualise the planner as an active explorer of those spaces. It challenges some aspects of Christensen's degrees of complexity, which include the role of communicative rationality and language in relation to complexity. It displays both overlapping and sequential phases of temporary stability and instability, of differing degrees of complexity, which are separated by transitions at which relations between components change in a qualitative way. Although the mode of planning was adopted in a seemingly accidental way, it also displays invariant properties with regard to the transformations of planning conditions.
