Planning as Conflict Resolution - Michael Batty

For many years, physical planning has been articulated as a process of resolving conflict between different opinions about what constitutes the best locations for various facilities, activities, and land uses.  These conflicts are generic to social action and the definition of a plan which resolves such conflicts has been the quest of planners, designers and policy makers ever since physical planning became institutionalised in the late 19th century.

Here we define the process as one where key actors or stakeholders hold different values with respect to the best locations and suggest how such conflicts can be resolved through methods for pooling their different opinions about these best locations exist. A consensus is achieved if the various actors are able to communicate their opinions to one another, either directly or indirectly through an appropriate social network and from these emerge the relative importance that the different actors' opinions play in the final consensus.

In short, the methods we will demonstrate are able to generate the relative importance of each actor in the process, hence the relative importance of each opinion in the final mix. These methods map onto many different formal systems ranging from Markov Averaging to Artificial Neural Nets but here we focus on developing a variant which enables us to take simple maps which represent the relative importance of each location with respect the opinion of each actor, generate a network by comparing or ‘correlating’ the maps, and thence resolving the conflicts through an averaging procedure. We concluded by speculating on how such models can be tuned to real processes for all we are currently able to do in the absence of detailed observations of how conflicts are actually resolved, is to illustrate the methods for hypothetical processes but in real situations.

We demonstrate all this for a semi-real ‘toy’ problem of land development in the heart of London where a small set of stakeholder agents have different degrees of interest and control in and over a small set of land and building sites (parcels).