Liquid Planning, Wiki-Design - Learning from the Case Pispala

As the key aspects of theories of complex systems have been established, the premises for academic research on planning and on planning praxis still necessitates the development of novel planning tools and approaches to address inevitable urban self-organizing transformations. We have accepted that cities emerge from bottom up. However, planning methods simulating this emergence are still limited. Progress has been made in recent decades and many systemic, evolutionary, and computing based planning approaches have been proposed. The work here builds on these premises.
In network theoretical, computational, and democracy discourses, proxy or liquid approaches have been proposed to have potential for genuinely democratic forms of decision-making. More importantly they provide a method for information organization from bottom up in a digital platform. This process actually follows the very principles of self-organization of information in information or cognitive sciences: entropy decreases as the “bits” of information are self-organizing into coherent classes. These principles could be applied in bottom up planning approach as well. For this purpose, and to bring this discourse closer to the planning realm, I compered here the conceptualized structures of Liquid Democracy, SIRN cognitive model and prior self-organizing planning proposals to a bottom up planning experiment in Pispala neighborhood, Tampere, Finland. I evaluated its capacity for self-organization of information and hypothesized the case provides a frame for a new self-organizing planning method. Based on this evaluation a structure for a digitalized Liquid Planning procedure is suggested and discussed.