Navigating Post-Growth Planning: Leveraging Complexity for Being Intentional and Unintentional

Leveraging Complexity for Being Intentional and Unintentional

Abstract

Spatial planning faces mounting challenges with regard to land use, housing, energy, and infrastructure – fields where traditional solutions, such as expanding land use, are no longer viable or desirable. Planning’s fundamental assumptions of temporal certainty, linear control, and clear roles erode and demand fundamental rethinking. This paper connects post-growth planning to complexity theory to navigate this tension by emphasising adaptivity, reflexivity, and normativity. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, the exploration reveals how spatial planning’s self-images and roles reproduce growth-dependent actions despite mounting evidence of their unsustainability. It uses insights, especially with regard to land use, as well as podcast interviews with key thinkers to transcend these lock-ins by embracing ‘intentional unintentionality’. In so doing it deliberately reshapes one’s own roles while acknowledging the non-linear, unpredictable effects on external systems. The transformative potential lies not in top-down control but in planning’s capacity to generate alternatives from within; leveraging complexity to align with post-growth priorities.