ABSTRACT
As climate change, technological development and
liveability requirements are putting local governments
under pressure to deliver new holistic aspirations
to our increasingly congested cities, urban planners
are facing the responsibility to manage accelerating
complexity within rigid public governance systems.
The city of Copenhagen has now developed visionary
and extensive plans for tackling climate change
effects in a new cloudburst management system,
promoted to deliver innovative green-blue and
recreational urban areas over the next 20 years. The
road has however been a bumpy one so far, and
our exploration of the field tell a story of a municipal
system struggling to align administrative procedures
and critical regulatory considerations to new hydraulic
requirements. Following an ‘infrastructuring’ approach
inspired by Actor Network Theory we seek
to experiment with new methods within the Systems
Oriented Design field to address the challenges of
collaboration across planning domains in the municipal
system. In our approaches to aid the Technical
administrations of Frederiksberg and Copenhagen
Municipalities to navigate the increasing complexity
of cloudburst management, we found that planning
practices and how collaborative planning is currently
facilitated presents a need for systemic design capacity.
To allow for a more whole systems approach
to the wicked nature of intertwined urban planning
problems our research concludes that mapping out
complexity in collaborative work sessions and presenting
systemic relations more visually, might be a way
forward to address these wicked problems in a more
holistic practice.