Document Type : Review article
Authors
Department of Urban Planning and Management, School of Urban Planning, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
10.22059/jurbangeo.2024.369158.1904
Abstract
Today, new problems in urban planning are considered wicked due to their complexity, uncertainty, and normativity. Despite introducing the wicked problem concept during the last five decades, identifying urban wicked problems and how to encounter them is still an issue at the center of focus and study among urban planning theorists. Therefore, this article aims to develop a framework for identifying wicked problems in urban planning. The study’s methodology is a genealogical analysis that examines the phenomena in their historical development and creates a suitable critical position for understanding their current conditions. In this way, the concept of wicked urban problem has been subjected to genealogical analysis in five stages, including identification, records, discourses, discontinuity analysis, and criticism of the present. According to the proposed framework, wicked urban problems could be identified in two general categories, problem-oriented characteristics and solution-oriented characteristics, which subsequently include features such as uncertainty in definition and configuration, uniqueness, interrelationship and closeness, the impossibility of defining a definitive solution, the inexhaustibility of the encountering process, and the extensive and inevitable consequences of addressing. Meanwhile, the absence of a leading authority, the limited opportunity for encountering, and escalating by those who encounter lead to the emergence of super wicked urban problems. The presented framework for identifying wicked problems in urban planning lays the groundwork for a more detailed analysis and, accordingly, more efficient approaches to encounter them for urban planners and policymakers, which will need to be applied and scrutinized in future related thematic and case studies.
Keywords
', './data/jurbangeo/coversheet/cover_en.jpg'))