local government? How to organize and integrate an indigenous first-peoples’
meeting house into the wider urban community? or, more personally, Which uni-
versity? Whom to befriend? When to marry? What job to apply for? When to move
on?
With all these complex issues there is an easily understood
empirical element; for example the advantagesof impact mitiga-
tion, the worthof community boards, meeting houses, university
training and overseas experience. Values-ordering in a systemic
way predicates that the resolution of complex issues can produce
multiple outcomes. Within the one and the same methodology a
traditionalconsideration of the real world is attached to a radical
consideration of ‘rich pictures’ and ‘root definitions’ leading to
‘conceptual modelling’ (Checkland 1987). The advocates for SSM
perceive what takes place, operationally, as ‘iterative’, ‘heroic’ and
‘immediate’ – to which I would add ‘dialogic’ – putting SSM at
the extreme end of the radical spectrum.
A serious complication with SSM concerns difficulties about
incorporating the needs of persons who are marginalized or
have minority standing. Persons of such compromised standing
fear transactional and macro-institutional power, a particular
problem for those too cowered, too domestically busy, too down-
right tired or sidelined by disability or age, or too under-educated
to compete against the decisions and actions being dished out to
them through their otherwise liberal democracy. The challenge
for SSM is to incorporate the feelings and findings of such
marginalized and repressed people. Sensitive and sophisticated
the soft systems methodology may set out to be; yet it is mostly
responsive and useful to people who know clearly what their
problem is!
This passage on the radical-multiplex approach to planning, in
association with the earlier passage on traditional-lineal planning
has examined underlying theory in real-world situations. And
that real-world is now, more than ever before, in touch with itself,
better informed and educated, and is more prone to ask questions
and expect results which are an improvement on the best-guesses
which local government agencies previously dished out.
Choosing a strategic way is both facilitated and impeded by an
avalanche of information, analysis, diagnosis, prognosis and
democratic participation.
Since WWII Anglo settler societies have been exposed to an exponential
increase in resource exploitation and technological danger, which also gives rise
to a host of advocates ‘for’ and ‘against’ each and every project. Radical devel-
opment planning and conservancy practice is concerned to design and attain
transformations which include growth and are socially improving within ongoing
whole-community and whole-environment contexts.
Knowledge Power Outcomes 65‘Immediacy’ associates
SSM with just-in-time
consumer durable
production, suggesting
that a ‘better fit’ might
be found for SSM with
industrial-commercial
planning in the private
sector than with
conservancy and
development planning
for the public sector.‘low income people,
particularly parents, face
great obstacles to
participating in planning
or other public
processes. This situation
is an obstacle to
creating wider...
communities...based
on overlapping political
interests. It is also a
challenge for developing
democracy.’
‘Ethical Behavior is
Extraordinary Behavior’,
Howell Baum, 1998What is required is ‘an
alternative approach to
“participation” that does
not necessarily privilege
the knowledgeable,
the organised, the
resourceful and the
established interested
parties’.
Land Use Planning and
the Mediation of Urban
Change, Healey,
McNamara, Elson, Doak,
1988