Figure above suggests that urban planner can play a new major role in administrative leadership, adaptive leadership, and enabling leadership spaces. Anchored on complexity theory and looking at planning literature, I am thinking about defining the role of planner in each of these leadership spaces as below:
Adaptive (entrepreneurial) leadership space
Hoch (1994) contends that planners have two opportunities for deliberation in planning; first, turn the adversarial either-or choice approach to deliberative approach and making relationship between parties; second, when interdependent parties need to come together because of uncertainty. These two occasions are the conflict situations that planner is present in. Both represent a complex situation. It seems in planning, this space is closely connected to enabling leadership space. Planner is able to use these situations as pressures for system change. S/he can make use of these conflicts to create an enabling space as a broker. For using these two opportunities, planners need to know how to negotiate and lobby as a genuine public deliberation to make use of these situations for the benefit of novelty and innovation (Hoch, 1994; Levine et al., 2004)
Enabling leadership
This space emerges out of the battle in the previous space. Now, planner a deliberative practitioner (Forester, 1999), democratic professional (Dzur, 2019), heat raiser (movement, campaign designer) not only can turn the local spaces of whisper, dissatisfaction, inertia (figure 2) to adaptive spaces of learning, innovation, and creation but help the society (community, city) build the patterns of relationship and their cohesive network (Holladay & Tytel, 2011). Public meetings like town meeting halls, citizen juries, enclave meetings, world café, etc. as well as people-centered institutions like CBOs, CBAs, etc. can be representations of such adaptive spaces and attractor tags (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017). In designing such spaces, Forester (1999;2009) argues that planners as design professionals must often integrate listening, negotiation, mediation, facilitation, and consensus building as communication skills and know the differences between facilitating a conversation (dialogue), moderating a debate (argument), and mediating a negotiation (proposals of actions).
Administrative (operational) Leadership
Planners as the leaders of adaptive and enabling leadership spaces and former formal consultants of city managers can play a major role to help administrative leaders act as sponsors, aligners, and executers (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017). Planners can also make sure that public administration would not use adaptive spaces as means for technology of participation (fake participation). These transformative learners also can help public administrations create adaptive spaces inside the administrative systems like participatory budgeting platforms inside the city government or Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM). Furthermore, planner can act as a M & E expert for public administrations.
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