How to make planning decisions that are clear now and robust in the future?
Black swans have been made famous recently through the pertinent book of the same name by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb . The main concept is that many of the critical events affecting development are unpredictable. This doesn’t mean that there is no point in predicting, but rather that we should be more modest in terms of our abilities and thus need to plan for robust or resilient frameworks which can more easily adapt to changing and unknowable situations. The change factors are many, but recent examples include 9/11, Tsunami, Financial crisis, Iraq, impacts of climate change. For example, in many countries urban development may be significantly funded by remittances from migrant workers. Much building in Egypt was funded by those working in the Gulf as professionals or in Iraq as labourers. A political change can send migrant workers home and at a stroke stop major sources of funding. Interest in climate change adaptation and mitigation have given further impetus to the need for resilience in planning and design decisions.
However, it is easy to talk about flexibility. In development planning we need to propose locations, layouts, infrastructure levels, rules and regulations and institutional relations. Hard decisions need to be made. A road reservation needs defined lines. We need to put more weight on making those decisions resilient and relevant for situations that are likely to be much less predictable than we as planners and engineers have been used to assume.
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