Urban Complexity and Planning: Theories and Computer Simulations (2015)

Urban Complexity and Planning: Theories and Computer Simulations, Shih-Kung Lai and Haoying Han, Surrey, Ashgate, 2014, 261 pp., £65.00, ISBN 978-0754 6-7918-9This book reflects a brand new perspective on serious urban planning studies for 'theorists and practitioners involved in the decision-making processes and planning' (p. xxi). The book as a whole primarily deals with how to best conceptualise and model decision-making processes and their determinants and influencing factors, with the help of computer simulations - the latter no longer commonly seen in other planning books. One of the most important theoretical foundations of the book is the garbage-can model by Cohen et al. (1972), of which the authors give a nice summary in Chapter 2 (p. 26) and several other places. The first chapter is an initial overarching attempt by the authors to link planning, which is regarded as 'controlling over entry time of choice opportunities' by the authors (p. 27), to the aforementioned model. Not surprisingly, the planning definition of this book is akin to those by other 'Illinois School' researchers (see Hopkins and Knapp, 2013; Hopkins, 2014 for instance). After Chapter 1, which is one of the earliest refereed publications of the authors' on connecting the garbage-can model to planning and related phenomena such as spatial changes, safety, creativity and locational choices of firms, the authors start adding more complexities to the connections. But in Chapter 2, for instance, decision cost and problem disutility are both introduced, carefully considered and their effects on organisational performance evaluated based on simulation results. In Chapter 3, space is factored into the simulations. Later in the book, other complexities such as uncertainties in planning objectives, environments and available alternatives and time are, in turn, reflected upon in the simulations. The more complexities are introduced, the more difficult it is for the authors to devise and run good simulations and to interpret related results. However, I generally agree with the authors that 'the simulation result is encouraging' (p. 222), even after more complexities are accounted for. The last chapter (Chapter 15), for instance, convincingly shows that planbased actions, when understood as multiple and linked decisions, are more effective than decision-based actions that treat decisions as discrete and independent.The book could be a surprise to those theorists or professionals who believe that planning is exogenous to the urban or regional systems that it tries to control or influence. The book, as a whole, treats planning as part of the systems and as combinations of actions of different interactive actors, as interlinked rather than discrete decisions and as decisions and actions that can be changed with information. To best account for this new definition or understanding of planning, the book thus frequently draws ideas from subject areas other than urban and regional planning. Chapter 6, for instance, introduces the prisoner's dilemma, an experimental economics concept, into cellular automata; Chapter 8 considers the path-dependent concept popular among new institutional economists; and Chapter 10 re-examines the Power Law Distribution (i.e. Zipf's law) of human settlements with the assistance of 'increasing return' - a commonly used concept by regional scientists and micro-economists. …