Liquid planning, wiki-design—Learning from the Case Pispala

Abstract

As the key aspects of theories of complex systems have been established, the premises for academic research on planning and on planning praxis still necessitates the development of novel planning tools and approaches to address inevitable urban self-organizing transformations. We have accepted that cities emerge from bottom up. However, planning methods simulating this emergence are still limited. Progress has been made in recent decades and many systemic, evolutionary, and computing based planning approaches have been proposed. The work here builds on these premises. Network theoretical, computational, and democracy discourses have proposed proxy or liquid approaches as for genuinely democratic forms of decision-making. More importantly, they enable information organization from bottom up in a digital platform. This process actually follows the very principles of self-organization of information in information or cognitive sciences: entropy decreases as the “bits” of information self-organize into coherent classes. These principles are also applicable in bottom-up planning. Hence, and to bring this discourse closer to the planning realm, I compared the conceptualized structures of Liquid Democracy, SIRN cognitive model and prior self-organizing planning proposals in a bottom-up planning experiment in Pispala neighborhood, Tampere, Finland. I evaluated its capacity for self-organization of information and hypothesized that the case provides a frame for a new self-organizing planning method. Based on this evaluation a structure for a digitalized Liquid Planning procedure is suggested and discussed.