Vain foresight: Against the idea of implementation in planning

Abstract

Why are many plans not implemented? Common explanations are planners have little power, they fail to account for political or environmental uncertainty in the plans or they failed to include enough voices during the planning process. The theoretical frameworks on which we base our understanding of plans focus on implementation as a key evaluative mechanism. I challenge the premise that plans realise their potential only when they are implemented. Monitoring implementation of plans presupposes that we know what plans there are to monitor. Such monitoring privileges published plans and ignores all the other plans that guide urban development. It assumes that the decision situations in which plans are used are observable. By jettisoning implementation as a key criterion by which to evaluate the effectiveness of plans, we can begin to focus on the myriad ways in which plan makers and others use plans. We can instead ask, ‘How are these plans used? Who uses them? When are they useful? How to make useful plans?’ With these questions, we can create different evaluative frameworks for different types of plans. Some unimplementable plans are worth making.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.