Rationalities for adaptive planning to address uncertainties

Adaptive planning has potential as an answer to coping with autonomous and spontaneous change. Such changes occur at all time and recently have been accompanied by an unprecedented dynamism and complexity. The interconnectedness of such processes is only increasing, and their dynamics have an unstoppable effect on almost everything. What seems to us as stable is often not much more than a temporal period of persistence, a frozen momentum within a dynamic world, the lee side of a world in flow. We consider this world to be out of equilibrium. And this is fundamental: while we like to see ourselves – the planner in particular – as the ‘creator’ of space and place, we seriously have to consider a world, as well, which is creating itself without purposeful interventions, develops often beyond our control, and despite our intentions progresses autonomously. These unexpected and unpredictable changes demand a different perspective in which planning will be ‘following’ and ‘responding to’ instead of ‘leading’ and ‘controlling’. Adaptive planning stands out in the search for alternatives to cope with these changes. Various kinds of adaptive planning will be identified in this chapter. We will explore their relationship with the current planning debate and its paradigmatic rationalities, i.e. the technical and the communicative rationality. We will extend the contemporary rationality framework for planning behaviour with several rationalities that each could be a ‘frame of reference’ for adaptive behaviour dealing with wide-ranging situations in a dynamically changing and transformative environment. This results in an extensive rationality framework for planning behaviour, which presents various new forms of adaptive planning and offers a vastly expanded world of planning possibilities!