Environmental Conflicts in Compact Cities: Complexity, Decisionmaking, and Policy Approaches

In most parts of Europe compact city policies have become a popular means of planning for sustainability. Dense compact cities were seen as solutions to reduce continually increasing mobility. They were also seen as a way to avoid urbanization of the countryside. Lately planners have been expressing serious doubts about the impact of these positive effects of the compact city concept. Planners in the Netherlands are instead shifting their attention more to environmental dilemmas which result, in part, from compact city policies. A number of these dilemmas are caused by frictions between environmentally sensitive and environmentally intrusive functions in a compact urban setting. Traditionally these dilemmas or conflicts were taken care of by using a functional rationality approach, that is one emphasizing direct causal relations between cause and effect. In the Netherlands this has resulted in a top-down policy, urging local authorities to keep enough distance between conflicting functions. Unfortunately the compact city concept adds an extra dimension to the problem, favouring mixed use and a dense urban area. Keeping distance can therefore no longer be the primary solution to environmental conflicts in urban areas. Environment conflicts have become, so to speak, more complex owing to spatial pressure and to a growing number of different interests that have to be taken into account. Functional rationality approaches may no longer be sufficient to solve these complex dilemmas or conflicts. Rather than keeping distance as the only possible solution to deal with conflicting functions, in the Netherlands local participation is also recognized as an effective approach towards some of the more complex conflicts. This communicative approach is gradually gaining acceptance in the Netherlands—and in other parts of the world as well—as a potential method for dealing with planning issues. In this paper functional and communicative rationality are seen as two extremes of the same spectrum, with complexity as the key word linking the two together. This has lead to the following thesis: the effectiveness and efficiency of a solution will depend on the assignment of the conflict's complexity. In this case, complexity is no longer seen as a metaphor, but instead as essential for examining planning issues, including environmental conflicts in compact cities.