Unplanned Development offers a fascinating and fresh view into the realities of development planning. While to the outsider most development projects present themselves as thoroughly planned endeavours informed by structure, direction and intent, Jonathan Rigg exposes the truth of development experience that chance, serendipity, turbulence and the unexpected define development around the world.
Based on rich empirical sources from South-East Asia, Unplanned Development sustains a unique general argument in making the case for chance and turbulence in development. Identifying chance as a leading factor in all development planning, the book contributes to a better way of dealing with the unexpected and asks vital questions on the underlying paradoxes of development practice.

Jonathan Rigg is a development geographer at Durham University. He has been conducting fieldwork in South-East Asia, mainly in rural areas of the Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam, since the early 1980s. His interests include agrarian change, rural-urban relations, political ecology, and migration and mobility. He is also the author of An Everyday Geography of the Global South (2007), Living with Transition in Laos (2005), Southeast Asia: The human landscape of modernisation and development (2003) and, most recently, edited with Peter Vandergeest, Revisiting Rural Places: Pathways to poverty and prosperity in Southeast Asia (2012).

Preface
1. The hidden geometries of development
2. From development plans to development planning
3. State and market perfections and imperfections
4. The teleology of development: history and technology
5. The power of ordinary events in shaping development
6. Fertility decline and its consequences in Asia
7. Contingent development
Notes
Bibliography