Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies Towards a relational planning for our times

This book is written for all those with an interest in the present and future qualities of cities and urbanised areas. For those involved in policy development and management, it offers concepts and cases through which to reflect on the challenges they face and the contributions they are making. For students training to get involved in such governance work, it provides a foundation of ideas and experiences. For social scientists in urban geography, policy and politics, it offers not merely an account of the place-focused practices of governance. It also develops an approach to the analysis of governance dynamics which highlights efforts at transforming discourses and practices. Finally, for those in the planning field itself, it seeks to reinterpret, with a twenty-first-century relevance and grasp, the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics, and in generating elements of both fixity and mobility in the complex evolving systems through which the material realities and imaginative possibilities of urban life are produced.