Planning Adaptation: Accommodating Complexity in the Built Environment

Obsolescence and vacancy are part of the traditional building life cycle, as tenants leave properties move to new ones. Flux, a period uncertainty before establishment direction, can be considered DNA. What is new, due structural disruptions in way we work, rate regularity flux, reflected obsolescence, vacancy, impermanent use. Covid-19 has instantly accelerated this disruption. Retail failure increased with even more consumers moving online. While employees have been working from home, rendering office central business district, at least temporarily, obsolete. This article reflects on situation by reporting findings an 18-month research project into practice planning adaptation English built environment. Original based interviews national sample local authority planners, combined institutional analysis since 1947 Town Country Planning Act, suggest that discipline England struggling reality flux. There demand for act faster, speed change environment, liberal political concerns regulation. relaxations permitted development rules use categories. However, participants also indicate there concurrent need system operate measured way, plan nuanced complexity environment no longer striated singular categories level. notion flux suggests process perpetual change, turbulence, volatility. our within process, temporal dialectic between accelerating concomitant careful accommodate adaptation. We situate these novel reading complex adaptive systems literature, arguing needs embrace uncertainty, rather than eradicate it, order enable These significant because they offer framework understanding how successful enabled England, beyond negativity associated buildings recent years. achieved recognizing interactions involved respective stakeholders offering insight scales governance coexist successfully.