Opportunities for Institutional Design

Van Assche (2007) referred that “every social system constructs its own space, according to its own rules of self-organization”. When this position faces communication within networks in our case, they act as autopoietic systems, while producing and reproducing their basic entities including functions and structures (Luhmann, 1986). This could be fragmented into individual agents connected by networks, and agents interact dynamically while exchanging information.

Additionally, it is important when addressing such institutional networks, to consider that they are increasingly ‘light’. As Knorr Cetina (2005) indicated them as informal, rational, non-bureaucratic and lightly-regulated, thus capable of being flexible and adaptive toward different contexts. This supports our argument to correlate them with self-organization. As they often appear in temporal dimensions, and flows of entities and practices (Knorr Cetina, 2005). This is realized in our storyline when Egyptian formal government tried to dismiss demonstrations by creating an Internet blackout. However, the youth continued to demonstrate and protest and their numbers have increased. Egyptians managed to have their voices be heard through advanced technical workarounds and old

traditional technologies, including word-of-mouth and phones (Muscara, 2011).

Moreover, one approach that seems to be correspondent with our relational and post-structuralist positions, which is the perspective of relational complexity. Monno (2012), refer to this approach as one of the interesting ways to shape the quality of places democratically to deal with the diverse identities of society. This could end up with new imaginative and creative institutions able to avoid oppression and exclusion. Healy (2008) perceived this type of institutions with regard to public sphere, as a consequence of a twofold reason. On the one hand, they could be constructed as nodes of social encounter in a fluid and dynamic manner in the absence of state, which could be defined as a self-organized process. On the other hand, formal governance could be also fostering their spontaneous emergence through creatively transforming their productive capacities into planning policies and strategic plans. This might sound too ideal or virtual in the sense of the unseen in present, if we combine it with the Habermasian theory of public space (Habermas, 1991). However, through our analysis to the new emerging public space, we argue that it could be starting to bring this virtual image to reality. This has appeared on the horizon, through the adaptive nature to transform from self-organization to a form of self-governance. Swyngedouw (2005), promoted this idea as an important issue for planning, the idea of forming adaptive forms of governance/government associated with the emergence of such relational social creativity. Therefore, we see promising institutional opportunities in this convergence between the physical and virtual in the public space, as it could lead the way towards sustainable future bridging institutions between the formal and informal. This sustainability would therefore relay basically on the adaptive and creative nature of such institutions.

In order to envision the nature of these future institutions, based on our post-structuralist and framing theory approach, we propose a spectrum able to formulate our understanding on making use of the self-organization within informal communities. This has could result in discovering adaptive forms of governance which could cope or manage this self-organization capacity, as discussed above, we suggested that this capacity was enabled through a new type of public space, which was co-evolving between the urban and virtual spaces. Thus, here we are trying to further the idea that has introduced in (Figure 2), which was an attempt to relate turning from revolution to stability with the two phases of self-organization.

Moreover, we are building this proposed spectrum between two conditions based on the lessons that we deduced from the emergence of collectiveness along the Egyptian revolution. This duality could explore the emergence of social media, informal collectives and public place in a wider context. On one hand, the first condition on this spectrum is the case in which informal communities self-organize to set their own politics separately and in the absence of state (revolution or pre-policy). This could be the result of the obsession of control and functional objectivity. On the other hand, the second condition is the case in which the formal institutions have adaptive capacity to experiment with the informal, by leaving a space for informality to deploy creativity and act within the gaps of rules in order to fill the void between the formal and informal.

As such, we argue that creativity has the capacity to fill a gap in knowledge on the future of virtuality, through bridging these two extremes. This highlights the importance of considering the area in between: An area of co-evolution. That is to say, putting the mechanism of association-creativity in the centre of spatial planning practice might be a window of opportunity to cope with the becoming of a co-evolving urban-virtual environment (Shirky, 2009; De Roo et al., 2012). This association-creativity is suggested to accommodate the convergence of identities in a common ground and a new of form public space and political practices. This may result in the formation of a co-evolving mode of governance for more participatory planning and inclusive urban governance. This mode could sustain the balance between self-organization and stability. This relates strongly to concept of post-policy or governance-beyond-the-state.