Planning for uncertainties / Learning from adaptive complex systems
Author: Ledian Bregasi
Affiliation: Polis University
Abstract
The act of planning itself embodies a number of contradictions. Moreover, considering the Albanian context, planning has a strong cultural background that looms over every planning initiative. It either echoes the five-year plans of the communist regime, or reminds the chaotic development of the difficult transition years to a free market economy. Considering these extremes, discussing about planning in Albania means dragging heavy concealed implications. In these conditions, drafting a General Local Plan1 in Albania means defining the best possible solution to a very complex problem such as a territory can be, foreseeing every possible problem that would arise in the next 15 years of urban, rural, social, demographic or economic development. The typical analytical approach to such a problem would be based on the assumption that our reality is highly deterministic and that what stops us for predicting the future is the not precise enough information that we have about the present. So a deeper analysis of the present situation would unveil the possible developments of the future and every planned activity in a territory would result in a precise outcome. This approach is based on the presumption of Pierre- Simon Laplace in 1814 which states that if some entity would know the precise location and momentum of every particle of the universe in a precise moment, the past and the future of the universe would become known.
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