System-Theoretical Approaches in Urban Development: History of Development, Perspective and Basic Positions

In Chap. 2 , we elaborated mainly on a descriptive level about urban complexity and the particular challenges faced by the locally operating organizations. By focusing on specific areas of responsibility, prescribed routines and organizational decision-making logics, organizations fulfil their functions and duties to deal with this complexity. They develop programs and mechanisms to make urban complexity appear more calculable (cf. Rolfes 2017, p. 50). If one agrees with Luhmann, however, administrations in particular tend to be risk-averse in their decision-making: “Bureaucratic behavior is notoriously risk-averse […]. The overriding rule is never to permit surprises” (Luhmann 2003, p. 203). For this reason, the suggestion is that governance models in municipalities tend to be organized in a linear and stable way; there are clear rules and precisely delimited areas of responsibility, which are predominantly hierarchical. According to Nassehi, this is “the normal model [in dealing with complexity, authors’ addition] whose forms of description seem most plausible to us” (Nassehi 2017, p. 72). In other words, when tackling urban complexity, it is rather rare to find such decision-making programs and procedures that are aimed at the explicit inherent dynamics of the different independent logics of municipal organizations and functional areas – this is in line with our observations and project experiences. Sporadic references to a system-theoretical or systemic approach do emerge in municipal or regional development (cf. Hohm 2003, p. 11 ff.; Carsten 2005, p. 78 ff.; Hummelbrunner et al. 2013, p. 97 ff.; Rolfes and Wilhelm 2013, p. 22 ff.). However, these have only gained selective acceptance in research and practice. Since we see considerable potential in the approaches suggested by systems theory and systemic strategies for dealing with and shaping urban complexity, this chapter will explain step by step what system-theoretical and systemic approaches in urban development are all about and why we prefer a form of conceptual symbiosis that we call “system-theoretical.”