A Systematic Overview of Planning on Campuses. Application of Organizational Cybernetics to Planning

Abstract

The variety of aspects to consider when managing urban interventions in university
settings is vast, since there are multiple aspects that could affect it (e.g. financial, environmental,
demographic, legislative, academic, urban, mobility, etc.). This requires to take into account and to
manage properly the complexity of the interrelationships between all of these aspects. This also
requires systematic methodologies that are capable of addressing this complexity, and is one of the
reasons for opting for Organizational Cybernetics (OC) as a complementary design and
implementation methodology in urban planning at the UDC. In this paper we show how OC has been
used to structure urban management at the university on several levels (territorial, urban region,
urban scale, campus scale and building scale and their surroundings). While only two of the four
stages proposed for the application of this methodology have commenced, this paper shows the
ability of this approach to enhance the variety of undertakings on the four scales considered. The
availability of a conceptual framework like the one proposed provides a systematic consistency for
all of the work proposed on the various scales. The University’s Technology Park and its residential
area on the territorial scale, the Campus Center and the intermodal station on the urban region
scale, the bicycle lane on the urban scale, the eco-neighborhood on the campus scale, and the
verification, opening and classification of the building environments are the actions described for
each of the four levels of recursion analyzed.