Understanding traditional residential architecture in Anatolia

Traditional architecture and associated environments created by residential buildings provide an important focus of interest in contemporary Turkey.1 1. The main thesis of this article is based upon my paper ‘Traditional Residential Architecture in Anatolia’, presented to a seminar on Conservation and Rehabilitation of Half-Timber Structures, Ankara: METU, 1989 and the doctoral thesis submitted to METU, Faculty of Architecture, Program of Restoration in 1994. The concepts have, however, been revised according to more recent surveys. They are generally accepted as physical witnesses of the past to be preserved and studied. Continuity in the traditional characteristics of the social group living in these environments has been observed in many of the extant settlements in Turkey. The reciprocal relationship between the dwelling and its owners, or users, has led to a dual definition of the ‘traditional dwelling unit’: the social unit being the ‘family’, the architectural unit the ‘dwelling’. The existing, modest-scaled, traditional dwellings in Turkey, which constitute the subject of this study, were mostly constructed after the seventeenth century, but more recent buildings exhibiting similar characteristics are also covered by the term ‘traditional’.2 2. The concepts of ‘tradition’, ‘culture’, ‘vernacular’, ‘historical’, ‘regional’, ‘pre-industrial’, ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ fall outside the limits of this study. The term ‘traditional’ has been used throughout the text; the term ‘Ottoman’ has not been adopted due to its attribution to the 1923 constitution of the Turkish Republic — it cannot, consequently, be used as reference to the continuation of tradition, which is one of the main ‘givens’ of this study. A term referring to a geographical distribution of archetype under investigation has been sought. There is an important building stock incorporating similar architectural characteristics within contemporary political boundaries of other countries, such as Iran, Bulgaria, Greece, etc., which had once formed part of the Ottoman Empire. ‘Turkey’ has not been preferred for its reference to the political boundaries of the Republican era for the same reason. Instead, another geographical term ‘Anatolia’ is considered in a widened context throughout the text to refer to a more generic concept than it implies geographically. Anatolia is considered to be the land of origin on which many cultures have emerged, generated and spread to the affected lands throughout history. Furthermore, the concentration of this study focuses specifically on extant dwellings in Anatolia. Within the confines of the term ‘traditional residential architecture in Anatolia’, there are further limitations. The origin of traditional residential architecture in Anatolia, its typological evolution, its social, cultural and/or historical aspects are not the major concerns of this study, which focuses on existing examples. A limitation of the period covered by this study accords with the construction dates of extant buildings from the seventeenth century onwards. This is an open-ended period because of the continuity in ‘traditional’ aspects in many of the settlements. The concept of ‘privacy’ serves as the basis of evaluation in analysing the interrelation of any two units. The interface of two units can be defined as an hierarchy of privacy represented sociologically by the interrelations of person/family/neighbourhood relationships and architecturally through the interrelations of room/dwelling unit/street/neighbourhood.3 3. This dwelling unit was the subject of the studio course ARCH 405 in 1989—1990, Autumn semester. The project was supervised by the author and Res.Asst. Ertu?rul Morçöl; the students were Önder Kaya, Ufuk Serin, Murat Aya?, Deniz Kutay and Gül Vanl?. This approach will include a brief summary of some previous studies of traditional residential architecture (Fig. 1).     

Planning and the communal state: interpreting community participation in Caracas

The paper adopts an interpretive institutionalist framework [Hay (2011 Hay, Colin. 2011. “Interpreting Interpretivism Interpreting Interpretations: The New Hermeneutics of Public Administration.” Public Administration 89 (1): 167–82. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.01907.x.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]), “Interpreting Interpretivism Interpreting Interpretations: The New Hermeneutics of Public Administration.” Martin (2015 Martin, Graham. 2015. “‘Ahora tienen que escucharnos’ [now they have to listen to us]: Actors’ Understandings and Meanings of Planning Practices in Venezuela’s ‘Participatory Democracy’.” PhD thesis, Cardiff University. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/77661/. [Google Scholar]), “‘Ahora tienen que escucharnos’ [now they have to listen to us]: Actors’ Understandings and Meanings of Planning Practices in Venezuela’s ‘Participatory Democracy.” PhD Thesis, Cardiff University, to unpack participants’ involvement in communal councils (CCs) and a commune, two Venezuelan reforms seeking to incorporate citizens into planning processes. The paper focuses on how participants in La Silsa, an informal neighbourhood in Caracas, understood and enacted upon community planning opportunities provided by these new councils. Municipal and national government staff and finance heavily supported La Silsa’s emerging commune and CCs. Despite the national government’s rhetoric of ‘constructing a new socialist, communal state’, the article identifies several challenges need to be overcome to successfully shift from existing representative institutional/governmental arrangements towards more participatory repertoires. The article’s findings mirror those of other empirical studies of Latin America’s democratic innovations: citizen participation strengthens representative governmental arrangements, rather than replace them with normative alternatives.     

The distinctiveness of cities Outline of a research programme

The city constitutes a remarkable and highly contested topic within the field of social sciences. There is literally not a single human theme that could not be related and imagined within the framework of the urban: sex and crime, production and reproduction: of power, hierarchy, poverty, life course and so forth. Paradigm shifts abound: from structuralist to cultural turns and from political economy approaches to phenomenology. The main challenge, however, seems to go unanswered. It is sex in the city, poverty in the city, immigrants in the city, but what is meant by the city other than an all-purpose nostrum for societal problems? I will briefly describe this confusion as a point of departure to offer some conceptual ideas of how to constitute the city as a scientific object of knowledge. My frame of reference will be what is labelled the ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences. The two main objectives are (1) to conceptualize the city as a particular space-structuring form of sociation and (2) to identify and qualify some features of this spatial form (Berking, H., 2008 Berking, H. 2008. “Städte lassen sich an ihrem Gang erkennen wie Menschen”. In Die Eigenlogik der Städte, Edited by: Berking, H. and öw, M. L. 15–31. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.  [Google Scholar]. Städte lassen sich an ihrem Gang erkennen wie Menschen. In: H. Berking and M. Löw, eds. Die Eigenlogik der Städte. Frankfurt am Main: Campus). Since there are different and differentiated spatial forms of sociation to analytically grasp the city’s distinctive spatial form is a precondition for reconstructing its internal symbolic order as a world in its own right. The key issues will be ‘density’ or more precisely ‘densification’ and ‘doxa’, the latter referring to what is called the natural attitude to the world, the pre-reflexive or tacit knowledge of everyday life (Lebenswelt).     

Bidding models: testing the stationarity assumption

With notably few exceptions, bidding models contain probability distributions with parameters that are assumed to be fixed, or stationary, over time. Some methods of testing the tenability of this assumption are examined and applied to eight datasets. Of particular interest is the statistical significance of two types of periodicity: (1) that bidders gradually reduce their bids prior to winning a contract; and (2) that bidders have periods in which they are more competitive and periods in which they are less competitive. To test (1), McCaffer and Pettitt's (1976 McCaffer, R. and Pettitt, A. N. 1976. Bidding behaviour in project management.. The Project Manager, 1(5): 5–8.  [Google Scholar]) cusum method is used and shown to have a limited interpretation in this context. McCaffer's ‘deficit’ statistic is then used in conjunction with a one‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and shows (1) to be untenable for the samples involved. To test (2), the deficit statistic is again used with an ANOVA to examine all possible sub‐series of bids.     

Sir Banister Fletcher: pillar to post–colonial readings

Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a ‘world history of architecture’? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture , which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into ‘The Historical Styles’ and ‘The Non-historical Styles’.

Resonating throughout this text, which began as a paper to a conference on ‘Globalisation and Representation’,1 1. This essay is enlarged from a paper given to the international conference Globalisation and Representation, University of Brighton, UK, 11th to 13th March, 2005. is the knowledge that the author has been commissioned to undertake a completely new text for the next edition of Banister Fletcher, for which work started in November, 2005. Pointers to how that project might proceed include its becoming a dual work, aware of the unspoken space between:

— a narrative with stress on points of cultural intersection and articulation of hybridity (after Homi Bhabha) rather than on the ‘constituent’ as opposed to ‘transitory’ facts of architectural history (after Siegfried Giedion), and:

— an archive of illustrated places, itself a social construct but one which recognises the role of viewer/reader in its [re]construction—for images are there to be plundered and misread, which is always their fate in the hands of creative designers.     

The Shape of Things to Come: New Urbanism,the Grid and the Cul-De-Sac

There is much debate in the UK, North America and Australia within both crime prevention and planning concerning New Urbanism and the design of suburban housing layouts. New Urbanism promotes high-density, mixed-use residential developments in ‘walkable’ neighbourhoods close to public transport, employment and amenities. One significant factor is New Urbanism's support for permeability and the preference of the grid street layout over the cul-de-sac (Morrow-Jones et al., (2004) Morrow-Jones, H., Irwin, E. and Roe, B. 2004. Consumer preference for neotraditional neighbourhood characteristics. Housing Policy Debate, 15(1): 171–202. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]. The authors present the evidence as it relates to the grid and the cul-de-sac across a range of inter-disciplinary issues such as crime, walkability, social interaction, travel behaviour, traffic safety, cost and sustainability and housing preferences. This paper provides a brief history of the grid and cul-de-sac, discusses their respective strengths and weaknesses and concludes that any ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is myopic and simplistic. It calls for a more holistic approach to understanding the localized and contextual dimension to suburban street layouts and how they may affect human behaviour. The paper highlights key areas for future research and calls for more inter-disciplinary debate and cooperation, particularly between environmental criminologists, planners and town centre managers.     

The challenges of creating actionable knowledge: an action research perspective

Academia has a critical role in developing new knowledge which construction industry practitioners need to envision, undertake and sustain successful innovation. The new knowledge produced by academia, however, often does not satisfy the needs of practitioners. This unsatisfactory state of affairs is frequently taken to be the consequence of the cultural, motivational and operational differences between the two communities. Actionable knowledge is presented as a useful concept which can fuse the expectations, contributions and outputs of academia and practitioners. Within this context, action research is argued to be an appropriate methodology to develop successful actionable knowledge. Results from an action research project are given which provide researchers and practitioners greater understanding of the key factors that shape the degree to which action research produces actionable knowledge: change focus, collaboration capabilities and systematic process. The criteria intrinsic to Mode 2 research (Gibbons et al., 1994 Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartz, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage.  [Google Scholar]) are demonstrated to have utility in evidencing actionable knowledge. The implication for policy is that there is a need to develop and use appropriate actionable knowledge frameworks and measures to design funding calls, and to evaluate research proposals and outputs.     

The tortoise,the scorpion and the horse - partial notes on architectural research/teaching/practice

‘With Blade Runner's replicants, circulating capital achieves its highest form and real subsumption attains its ultimate stage of development: the replicants become the privileged objects of society's intelligence.’1 Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, ‘Notes on the Sophisticated City’, trs, David Berris and Astrid Hustvedt, in, Sanford Kwinter and Michel Feher, eds, Zone 1/2 (New York, Urzone Inc., 1986), p.41.

The term ‘replicant’, drawn from the 1982 film Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott, is used here to conceptualise the ‘urbanism’ produced within the Central Building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for BMW's plant at Leipzig in 2005. It is used not so as to critique the project's urban dimension as fake, but to propose that it is, like the humanoid replicants of the film, a new reality produced by corporate capital designed to function in its service as an improved version of the original from which it is derived.2 Ridley Scott, Dir., Blade Runner (1982). In the film's opening sequences replicants are introduced, in the form of an entry from the 2012 edition of Webster's Dictionary, as follows: Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonisation of other planets. This proposition is developed through an analysis of the models of labour organisation currently utilised within managerial practice, and the confluence of its concerns with those of certain currents in contemporary architecture. The BMW Central Building is also analysed in the economic and political contexts of the plant's specific location, and with reference to the architectural means through which it has been designed to replicate and instrumentalise urban organisational patterns for the corporation.     

Toledo Tomorrow: reading Norman Bel Geddes' vision for the future in a shrinking Midwestern City

This paper examines Norman Bel Geddes’ 1945 Geddes, N. B. 1945. Toledo Tomorrow. Toledo: Toledo Blade. [Google Scholar] Toledo Tomorrow plan, his only proposal for a specific city, and its stamp on the morphology of today's Toledo. The paper surveys retrospectively the changes in the morphology of the city and critically analyzes the impact of the Toledo Tomorrow Plan. Today's Toledo, a shrinking rustbelt city, reflects Geddes' legacy of neglecting the historic core, focusing on highway infrastructure, that has since worked in tandem with the forces of decentralization and suburbanization, and the city's weak relationship with its natural features and larger region.     

Rethinking vernacular architecture: the case of Hanoks in South Korea

For five decades, academics and architects have been debating the subject of vernacular architecture. Although the exact scope and status of vernacular architecture is far from clear, this article shows how the concept of the vernacular can play a crucial role in protecting architectural diversity by examining different types of new hanoks, or Korean-style houses. Although the current Hanok Renaissance in South Korea tends to emphasise ‘elite’ traditional architecture over other types, there are cases of vernacular hanoks, that use local materials and construction methods but may not resemble well-known historical architectural forms. Such new vernacular hanoks are characterised by their pragmatic design approach and stylistic heterogeneity in the context of a highly formulaic architectural production.¹1. This work was supported by the Hongik University New Faculty Research Support Fund.     

A new way of developing semantic differential scales with personal construct theory

Measurement is a fundamental issue in management research. However, traditional scale development methods have the drawback of mixing researchers' bias with the scale design. Based on Ding et al.'s (2007 Ding, Z. K., Ng, F. F. and Cai, Q. Y. 2007. Personal constructs affecting interpersonal trust and willingness to share knowledge between architects in project design teams.. Construction Management and Economics, 25: 937–50. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) exploratory work, a new way to develop semantic differential measurement scales is proposed and tested with a survey in the context of the construction industry. The purpose is to provide researchers and practitioners with a new method to develop semantic differential scales for measurement while the bias from their own perspective can be reduced. The reliability and validity of semantic differential scales according to the new method are tested with SPSS and Amos 6.0. The results show that the generated semantic differential scales with this method have high reliability and validity. The new way to develop semantic differential scales offers researchers and practitioners one more choice of scale development. The general application of this new method to other contexts is yet to be tested.     

Positioning Lean within an exploration of engineering construction

Engineering construction has specific characteristics that separate it from other types of construction such as technical complexity, onerous safety, health and environmental regulations, duality of new build combined with maintenance and repair, largely owner/user commissioning clients, value propositions revolving around a production Process, etc. The recent Gibson report (Gibson, 2009 Gibson, M. 2009. Changing to Compete: Review of Productivity and Skills in UK Engineering Construction, London: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.  [Google Scholar]) highlighted several significant problems associated with engineering construction in the UK arising, in many cases, from skill shortages and poor client–contractor relationships. Informal observation and a literature review enable 12 factors to be proposed that differentiate engineering construction from other forms of construction. A new paradigm for the construction sector is Lean construction. This is an adaptation of Lean production and is based on a philosophy that focuses on delivering improved value through the assembly of problem-solving networks of knowledgeable and skilled people. Accepting that Lean construction exists in theory as a method for improving a raft of construction production issues, the question is asked here as to whether it is also relevant to the set of additional factors identified as applying specifically to production in an engineering construction context. The discussion concludes that Lean construction principles can be applied in engineering construction and that an improvement in value could be achieved. Note: throughout this paper the word ‘process’ is used in two contexts—the design and construction process and the end Process that is the function of the client business, e.g. water treatment Process, food manufacturing Process. The context is distinguished by the capitalization of the first letter.     

Stooking the Peanuts: Historical Agriculture and the Management of a Dying Seasonal Landscape,North-East New South Wales,Australia

Popular interest in seasonal landscapes reflects the importance of ephemera in people's appreciation of landscapes. Landscape management tends to focus on long-term and reasonably permanent qualities, typically at annual and, especially, decadal time scales. However, human interest in shorter-term and ephemeral landscape qualities—such as seasonal qualities—allows people to use scales of direct human experience to identify and define landscapes. Brassley (1998 Brassley, P. 1998. On the unrecognized significance of the ephemeral landscape. Landscape Research, 23: pp.?119?–?132 [Google Scholar]), reviewing the ‘unrecognized significance of the ephemeral landscape’, notes that permanent components are managed through planning instruments; while ephemera may be crucial to landscape appearance, they are largely unprotected or not managed. Here a seasonal landscape of historic peanut farming that remains, in small pockets, in northern New South Wales, Australia, is examined with a view to identifying sustainable management of this landscape. The landscape becomes visually distinctive during the annual cycle of cropping when peanuts are placed in rows of stooks. Stooks are small circular stacks of harvested plants built around a tomato stake and capped by a sack, used to dry the peanuts immediately after harvesting; they appear to be unique. Following Brassley's observations regarding the lack of management of ephemera in landscapes, the long-term viability and conservation of this landscape are examined. The problem is further heightened by the fact that, while this landscape is visually distinctive, it also represents a social and agricultural activity that is in decline and unlikely to survive in the near future. This raises questions about the long-term sustainability of such a seasonal landscape—it is truly ephemeral both annually and in the long term—and options for the retention of at least some of the key landscape components within a contemporary landscape are explored.     

Critical practice

Exploring the potential of musical indeterminacy is an area of interest in architectural research yet to be examined in great detail.1 1. Even though architects are interested in problems of space and its relationship to the human body, they rarely consider a design relationship between the two through the medium of sound, outside spaces organised for musical purposes (such as performance halls and opera theatres, wherein the consideration is limited to achieving specific acoustic and visual engineering requirements). Although recently there have been developments in this area of inquiry, still of particular value is the involvement of Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse with the Philips Pavilion, designed with Le Corbusier, and built for the 1958 World Show in Brussels. For further reading, see M. Treib, Space calculated in seconds: the Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996). It should be noted that while Xenakis had a degree in civil engineering, he worked as an architect, composer, mathematician and engineer. His interest in stochastic compositional processes is pertinent to his other architectural endeavours, including those undertaken whilst working in Le Corbusier's atelier such as Le Couvent Sainte Marie de La Tourette. Xenakis also separately published the mathematical thinking behind his compositional processes: see I. Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (New York, Pendragon Press, 1991). For a biographical discussion of Xenakis, including further information on La Tourette and the Philips Pavilion, see A. B. Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis (London, Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 21–25, 70–71, and N. Matossian, Xenakis (Cyprus, Moufflon Publications, 2005), pp. 121–140. One possible explanation for this is that design strategies in architecture attempt to define and/or enclose space in particular visual ways, whereas sound itself asserts new and specific vibrations that are non-visual, only aurally decoded. However, the disciplines of architecture and music both conventionally communicate their ideas through notational systems made up of temporal and spatial symbols. These symbols are extensions of their authors' ideas or instructions, generally manifested through the drawing or score, which are visual modes of defining arrangements of activity waiting to be interpreted by the viewer. It is through notational systems that I began my PhD in Architecture by Project with a focus on techniques that advance strategies of indeterminacy developed in music since the 1950s, initially through a musical score of the American composer John Cage.2 2. J. Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra (New York, Henmar Press Inc., [C.F. Peters Corp.], 1960).

For the purposes of this paper, I will limit the discussion on Cage to this score, and demonstrate how an understanding is being established that his work has consequences for other creative disciplines. I will then briefly discuss a series of architectural drawings by the architect Daniel Libeskind, and how the two interrelate.3 3. D. Libeskind, Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus (London, Architecture Association, 1983). In the second part of this paper I will extend the understanding of Cage's and Libeskind's respective temporal imagery and notation, and illustrate how these are contributing to two projects addressing ideas of space, sound and notation as part of my architectural doctorate. Underpinning the heuristic method of all my doctoral project work are ideas of indeterminacy as originally presented by Cage in the discipline of music. When taken up within the discipline of architecture, these ideas provoke difficult questions requiring answers yet to be fully resolved and as such, my two projects in this paper may appear aesthetically complete, however, they are not conclusive in content. Although it will be shown in this paper how inconclusive investigations are a necessary problem within my research, contributing to an understanding of these questions is the distinctive in(ter)vention of interdisciplinary media, how they inform, contest and support the research. To address this, and in summary, I will position my research's design-based approach within two contexts; first, within an Australian context of the PhD in Architecture by Project, and secondly, within ‘The Unthinkable Doctorate’ conference's thematic subcategory of ‘media’.     

Fire Whirl Experimental Facility with No Enclosure of Solid Walls: Design and Validation

In this work, a fire whirl facility with no enclosure of solid walls was designed, for experimental simulation of fire whirls in open field. Air curtains were used to produce the generating eddy of fire whirl. Tests were conducted to evaluate the capability of the new facility. It was found that there was an optimal tilt angle for the air curtains to produce stable fire whirls. Experiments of fire whirls under different pool diameters showed that the mass loss rate \( \dot{m} \) depended on the circulation \( \varGamma \) by \( \dot{m}\sim \varGamma^{1.18} \) and the dimensionless flame height satisfied \( H^{*} \sim \varGamma^{*0.71} \) (where the asterisks denote dimensionless variables). It was also found that the ratio of the continuous flame height to the whole flame height for different pool diameters was 0.67. The centerline temperatures varied with the normalized height \( Z \) by \( Z^{0.08} \), \( Z^{ - 1.30} \) and \( Z^{ - 2.18} \), respectively in the regions of the continuous flame, intermittent flame and plume. The radiative fraction was calculated to be close to 44%. All these results fit well with literature data, thereby the capability of the new facility for producing stable fire whirls was fully validated. Some potential applications of the new facility were discussed in detail. Especially, instruments such as infrared camera can be used to investigate the flame radiation of fire whirls by the new facility.     

Geographies of mortgage market segmentation: the case of essex county,new jersey

Since the late 1980s, mutually reinforcing trends in economic growth, public policy, and community activism have fostered a wave of residential mortgage lending to ‘underserved markets’ in US cities. Yet many of the changes in housing finance that supported sustainable home ownership also lured a new generation of subprime and predatory credit institutions specialising in high-cost, high-risk lending. For many urban and minority neighbourhoods, the old problems of exclusionary redlining are now accompanied by new dilemmas of exploitive greenlining. This paper analyses the market penetration of subprime lending institutions and the subsequent concentration of mortgage ‘pre-foreclosures’ in low- and moderate-income, African American neighbourhoods. Focusing on Newark, NJ, and its surrounding suburbs, Gary King's King G 1997 A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data (Princeton, Princeton University Press)  [Google Scholar] ecological inference technique and a series of logistic regression models are used to assess the role of borrower characteristics, institutional divisions, and neighbourhood context in the process of mortgage market segmentation. The evidence corroborates theories emphasising the dynamics of capital investment, financial services restructuring, and the economic incentives for racial-geographic targeting, and not the presumed credit deficiencies of urban and minority home owners. Unfortunately, the tidy empirical analysis offered here is overshadowed by the enormous societal experiment now underway across the US, as a wave of delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures undermines the belated minority home ownership gains achieved during the unprecedented boom of the 1990s.     

Planning for deep-rooted problems: What can we learn from aligning complex systems and wicked problems?

An earlier generation of planners turned to Rittel & Webber’s 1973 Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169. doi:10.1007/BF01405730[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] conception of “wicked problems” to explain why conventional scientific approaches failed to solve problems of pluralistic urban societies. More recently, “complex systems” analysis has attracted planners as an innovative approach to understanding metropolitan dynamics and its social and environmental impacts. Given the renewed scholarly interest in wicked problems, we asked: how can planners use the complex systems approach to tackle wicked problems? We re-evaluate Rittel and Webber’s arguments through the lens of complex systems, which provide a novel way to redefine wicked problems and engage their otherwise intractable, zero-sum impasses. The complex systems framework acknowledges and builds an understanding around the factors that give rise to wicked problems: interaction, heterogeneity, feedback, neighbourhood effects, and collective interest traps. This affinity allows complex systems tools to engage wicked problems more explicitly and identify local or distributed interventions. This strategy aligns more closely with the nature of urban crises and social problems than the post-war scientific methodologies about which Rittel and Webber had grown increasingly sceptical. Despite this potential, planners have only belatedly and hesitantly engaged in complex systems analysis. The barriers are both methodological and theoretical, requiring creative, iterative problem framing. Complex systems thinking cannot “solve” or “tame” wicked problems. Instead, complex systems first characterize the nature of the wicked problems and explore plausible pathways that cannot always be anticipated and visualized without simulations. The intersection of wicked problems and complex systems presents a fertile domain to rethink our understanding of persistent social and environmental problems, to mediate the manifold conflicts over land and natural resources, and thus to restructure our planning approaches to such problems.