What's next?

Last night, while chatting with Greg Fisher of Pinnacle Global Strategy, our conversation turned (as usual) to complexity theory.  During the Modern era, much planning theory and practice was a result of the idea that everything about cities and the built environment could be known and understood, giving rise to the notion of planner as all-seeing, omnipotent technocrat.  The backlash to this came with the rise of postmodernism, as the pendulum swung the other way, and theorists told us we could know nothing and that power must be vested in the many, not the few:  This ties in with a notion of chaos in the built system.

So what do we have today, with the rapidly expanding amount and quality of urban informatics and virtual modeled environments?  Have the academics who wrote over the last few decades about the networked society, about infrastructure, about actor-network theory all heralded a slow move towards applying complexity theory to the built environment?

[As an aside:  Much is being written about resilience in cities, and following natural and man-made disasters of recent years, the concept is getting a lot of attention.  I'm not sure that we are ready to understand what it is that makes urban systems resilient, as we don't yet really understand the complex interactions which characterise those systems.  But, as I keep saying, I'm not interested in examples of failure; they will teach us less than examples of near-failure, when systems that should have failed didn't - the problem is finding them!]