Gert de Roo

Jean Hillier

Complexity, complex systems and complexity theories are becoming increasingly important within a variety disciplines. While these issues are less well known within the discipline of spatial planning, there has been a recent growing awareness and interest. As planners grapple with how to consider the vagaries of the real world when putting together proposals for future development, they question how complexity, complex systems and complexity theories might prove useful with regard to spatial planning and the physical environment. This book provides a readable overview, presenting and relating a range of understandings and characteristics of complexity and complex systems as they are relevant to planning. It recognizes multiple, relational approaches of dynamic complexity which enhance understandings of, and facilitate working with, contingencies of place, time and the various participants' behaviours. In doing so, it should contribute to a better understanding of processes with regard to our physical and social worlds.

Systems, Assemblages and Simulations

Complexity and Planning

Michael Gunder

Based on a range of international studies on planning policy and practice, this book takes a Lacanian, and related post-structuralist perspective to demythologize ten of the most heavily utilized terms in spatial planning.

A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning

Planning in Ten Words Or Less

In this innovative work Jean Hillier develops a new theory for students and researchers of spatial planning and governance which is grounded primarily in the work of Gilles Deleuze. The theory recognizes the complex interrelation between place qualities and the multiple space-time relational dynamics of spatial governance. Using empirical examples from England and Australia, Hillier identifies the power of networks and trajectories through which various actors territorialize space and explores the social and political responsibilities of spatial managers and decision-makers. She considers what spatial planning and urban management practices could look like if they were to be developed along Deleuzean lines, and suggests alternative framings for spatial practice: broad trajectories or 'visions' of the longer-term future and shorter-term, location-specific detailed plans and projects with collaboratively determined tangible goals.

A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

This book examines issues of decision-making, communication and power in the planning process. The author explores the politics and power-plays which planning practitioners face and engage in, using real examples from planning practice.

An Allegory of Prudence in Land-use Planning

Shadows of Power

In this innovative work Jean Hillier develops a new theory for students and researchers of spatial planning and governance which is grounded primarily in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Using empirical examples from England and Australia, she explores what spatial planning and urban management practices could look like if they were to be developed along Deleuzean lines, and suggests alternative framings for spatial practice.

Shadows of Power examines public policy and in particular, the communicative processes of policy and decision-making. It explore the important who, how and why issues of policy decisions. Who really takes the decisions? How are they arrived at and why were such processes used? What relations of power may be revealed between the various participants? Using stories from planning practices, this book shows that local planning decisions, particularly those which involve consideration of issues of 'public space' cannot be understood separately from the socially constructed, subjective territorial identities, meanings and values of the local people and the planners concerned. Nor can it be fully represented as a linear planning process concentrating on traditional planning policy-making and decision-making ideas of survey analysis-plan or officer recommendation-council decision-implementation. Such notions assume that policy-and decision-making proceed in a relatively technocratic and value neutral, unidirectional, step-wise process towards a finite end point. In this book Jean Hiller explores ways in which different values and mind-sets may affect planning outcomes and relate to systemic power structures. By unpacking these and bring them together as influences on participants' communication, she reveals influences at work in decision-making processes that were previously invisible. If planning theory is to be of real use to practitioners, it needs to address practice as it is actually encountered in the worlds of planning officers and elected representatives. Hillier shed light on the shadows so that practitioners may be better able to understand the circumstances in which they find themselves and act more effectively in what is in reality a messy, highly politicised decision-making process.

An Allegory of Prudence in Land-Use Planning

Jason Byrne

Wendy Steele

Diana MacCallum

Donna Houston

This book focuses on the potential and possibilities for socially innovative responses to the climate emergency at the local scale. Climate change has intensified the need for communities to find creative and meaningful ways to address the sustainability of their environments. The authors focus on the creative and collaborative ways local- scale climate action reflects the extra-ordinary measures taken by ordinary people. This includes critical engagement with the ways in which novel social practices and partnerships emerge between people, organisations, institutions, governance arrangements and eco-systems. The book successfully highlights the transformative power of socially innovative activities and initiatives in response to the climate crisis; and critically explores how different individuals and groups undertake climate action as ‘quiet activism’ – the embodied acts of collective disruption, subversion, creativity and care at the local scale.

Climate Action at the Local Scale

Quiet Activism

Linda Hogan

I'M STILL HERE IS A PUBLIC MEMOIR BY A PRIVATE WOMAN. JEAN HILLIER, A 30 YEAR ADVOCATE FOR FINDING EMPLOYMENT FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES, OVERCAME A RARE CANCER BEFORE BEING STRUCK BY AN EVEN MORE RARE ILLNESS RESULTING IN BRAIN SURGERY AND EPILEPSY. WHILE UNDERGOING CHEMOTHERAPY WITH LOW ODDS FOR RECOVERY, SHE MET AND MARRIED HER CHILDHOOD BOYFRIEND WHO FORTIFIED JEAN'S HEALTH WITH UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. AFTER A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE, JEAN LEARNED TO NAVIGATE AND "TRICK" A FRACTURED HEALTHCARE SYSTEM. I'M STILL HERE SHARES HER UNIQUE STORY OF FEISTY SELF-ADVOCACY AND HER COMMITMENT TO SUPPORTING OTHERS WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS. HER CANDID STORIES ARE TOLD WITH HUMOR AND GRACE THAT COMPRISE AN ENTERTAINING AND ENLIGHTENING READ.

Jean Hillier

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