Soft-systems methodology as learning and management tool

Assuming that urban systems are a subset of human activity systems, decision making encompasses political and social issues as well as the planning and engineering issues. Political and social entities have been neglected in the past, though, due to engineers' and planners' reliance on operations research, systems engineering, and the power of quantitative methods to "solve" urban planning-related problems. These "hard systems" methodologies (HSM) have not been uniformly successful. This paper explains "soft systems" methodologies (SSM), demonstrating their useful application in problems concerning the rational intervention in human activity systems. SSM is an inquiring system used for tackling ill-structured, messy problem situations in engineering and planning. This effective, easy-to-use methodology is demonstrated in an example of a transportation planning situation. The two systems--HSM and SSM--complement and supplement each other.