Set theory, Systems and Jaga Mission
In his classic book ' A System's View of Planning ', George Chadwick wrote: "Not only can the whole of mathematics be developed from the concept of a set, but, as foreshadowed, the idea of a system stems naturally from that of a set." (p-28) While we all studied set theory in high school mathematics, its usefulness in making sense of the structure and behaviour of complex systems encountered regularly in urban planning, was never discussed adequately in planning school. The consequence is the absence of yet another powerful tool from the contemporary planners' toolkit and the state of confoundedness that naturally follows. Created by the German mathematician Georg Cantor in 1874, set theory "stems from the simple idea of a number of things which have a common property or properties and thus can be represented as elements of a set." (ibid) The relationship of set theory with the systems view of planning is made amply clear when we consider that, "