Bohm's theory of orders as a basis for a unified urban theory: A preliminary response to five commentaries

Introduction

First and foremost I would like to thank the five commentators for their engaging and thought-provoking commentaries on my article “Bohm's theory of orders as a basis for a unified urban theory”—to Egbert Stolk (ES), Geoffrey DeVerteuil (GDV), David Wilson (DW), Göktuğ Morçöl (GM) and Stefano Moroni (SM). As will transpire below, their comments enable to extend and clarify aspects of a unified urban theory not fully elaborated in the original article.

Of the five, three (GVD, DW, GM) refer to the question regarding ‘the necessity, desirability and possibility to unify urban theories’. A fourth commentary by SM directs attention to the role of planning in urban dynamics and by implication in a unified urban theory. Finally the fifth commentary by ES focuses on the place of Bohm's theory of orders in my studies since the 1990s and directs attention to Bohm's notion of creative dialogue. By this he further clarifies the notion of a unified urban theory as implied by Bohm's theory and in fact, responds to the above four.

My response below thus evolves in the following order: First, the question of the necessity, desirability, and possibility to unify urban theories is discussed. Next, the issue of planning as a response to SM is discussed. The discussions in the first two sections bring to the fore the fact that the meaning of the notion “a unified urban theory” is not unequivocal and thus must be clarified. The next section clarifies this notion and its various facets. The final section responds to the four (GVD, DW, GM, SM) via Bohm's notion of creative dialogue that stands at the center of ES's commentary.

The necessity, desirability, and possibility to unify urban theories

Stefano Moroni: on planning theory

Planning theory is an integral part of urban theory. Yet in my original paper I do not refer to it; this, for two main reasons: The first is that the miscommunication that typifies the relations between SMH-PPD and CTC doesn’t exist here. The collaborative or communicative planning approaches that emerged out of the SMH-PPD social theory oriented urban studies acknowledged CTC as is evident, firstly, by the books’ titles of two leading researchers—Healey (2007) with her Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategy: Towards a Relational Planning of Our Times; and Innes and Booher (2010) in their Planning with Complexity: An introduction to collaborative rationality for public policy. The extent to which their attempts at integrating SMH-PPD oriented planning with CTC is successful or not is another matter (see Portugali 2011, Sect. 12.3.1 on this issue). Secondly, as is evident by the rich research fruits of the AESOP complexity and planning group (https://aesop-planning.eu/aesop/about-aesop) of which SM commentary is an authentic representative.

The second reason for not including planning in the original paper concerns the essence of planning in CTC. In his commentary, Stefano Moroni considers urban planning as an intervention in an otherwise complex system. While this is the common view in this domain, my view is different: As shown in some details in several past studies (Haken and Portugali 2021; Portugali 2011, 2020; Portugali 2021), there are two interrelated forms of planning in the context of cities: cognitive planning versus professional/institutional planning. The first is a basic cognitive capability of humans, while the second “referring to governmental attempts to regulate the dynamic of cities …” (Portugali 2020). They are interrelated due to the uniqueness of cities as hybrid complex systems (HCS).

As noted in the original paper, in the evolving domain of CTC “the focus has moved from studying cities as complex systems analogous to material complex systems, then to cities as complex adaptive systems (CAS) analogous to organic complex systems.” To the latter I’ve added a third move, namely, that cities still differ from CASs in that they are HCS composed of artifacts which are simple systems and human agents which are complex systems (Portugali 2016). Cities as HCS come into being due to the specific nature of their parts—the urban agents which unlike other organic CASs adapt not only by physiological or behavioral forms of change, but by the production of artifacts, themselves a product of planning and design. From this follows, firstly, that each urban agent is a planner at a contain scale, ranging from the scale of an individual person (as a cognitive planner) to the scale of the city's planning team as an institutional planner. Secondly, that cities emerge bottom up out of the interaction between their many urban agents and their specific plans. Thirdly, that institutional urban planning and design is not an intervention, but rather participation, is a large scale self-organization process involving urban agents of all scales. As shown empirically (Portugali 2011, 2021), due to the property of non-causality that typifies complex systems, including cities, in many cases the plans initiated by small-scale urban agents (e.g. a single urban inhabitant) are more effective and influential than the plans of the institutional planners.

Interestingly, the recognition that humans as individuals and collectivities qualitatively differ from material and other organic system, forms the core of the view that therefore their study requires also a specific approach and methodology that differs from that of the material and life sciences. This is the main claim of the various social theory oriented approaches, including the SMH-PPD approaches to cities with hermeneutics as their main methodology.

SM's main claim in his commentary is that a unified urban theory must take into account planning theory as it evolved in the last decades in the context of CTC with specific emphasize of self-organization and planned “directed order.” I agree. But then, what exactly is this unified urban theory in SM's commentary and in the commentaries discussed above?

A unified urban theory

From the above three comments follows that the notion of “a unified theory” is not unequivocal and can be understood in more than one way. This section is thus a brief introduction to this notion, the way it is implied by Bohm's theory and the implications to a unified urban theory.

Egbert Stolk and the notion of “creative dialogue”

In his commentary ES follows Bohm's notions of explicate, implicate, and generative orders as they appear explicitly in Implicate Relations (Portugali 1993), then implicitly in my studies concerning CTC and recently, again explicitly, in The Second Urban Revolution (Portugali 2023). I’ve introduced and discussed Bohm's notions of order in some length in the original paper and at a later stage will further refer to the way ES presents and interprets them. Here, in connection with the response to the above four commentaries, I want to focus on the notion of “creative dialogue” which stands at the center of ES's commentary. This notion which is central to Bohm's theory appears in my original paper only implicitly. My response to ES's commentary here is thus an opportunity to extend the original paper by explicating the role of creative dialogue in Bohm's theory and in my suggestion for a unified urban theory. Here is a quotation from On Dialogue by Bohm (1996):

“Dialogue” comes from the Greek word dialogos . Logos means ‘the word’, or in our case we would think of ‘the meaning of the word’. And dia means through'—it doesn't mean ‘two’…. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. ….