Smart Cities: A Response to Wicked Problems

Facing up to wicked problems

The complexity and value-laden nature of sustainable development as shown in the previous sections provide examples of wicked problems. Creating solutions to these require new modes of thinking and new ways of working. Here we refl ect on some of the theoretical insights and how these play out in practice. Much of this is in its infancy and the pathways to maturity will take time and considerab...

Appreciating the Wicked Problem: A Systems Approach to Sustainable Cities

Abstract Sustainable city place-making is a complex process and can deliver systemic unintended or undesirable development paths such as poverty, health inequality, or environmental degradation over generations. The application of socio-technical and socio-ecological systems thinking is applied to this critical challenge of how to create sustainable cities. Creating sustainable cities demands a...

Cities and Health: A Response to the Recent Commentaries

Untangling wicked problems

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Diagnosing Wicked Problems

Horst Rittel defined his wicked problems theory to differentiate wicked problems, which are open-ended and controversial, from tame problems, which have a single correct solution. Rittel identified ten properties of wicked problems but did not indicate if all of these properties needed to hold before something could be deemed wicked. Failure to correctly classify a problem as wicked is likely t...