International Journal of Social Economics (1998), 25 (6/7/8) : 1005-1029. DOI: 10.1108/03068299810212414 If Planning is About Anything, What is it About? David Wadley and Philip Smith The University of Queensland, Australia Alongside Clem Tisdell’s prodigious scholarship, colleagues appreciate a quality he displays which characterises both economists and natural scientists. He sees the oddities in things – their incongruities, underside, gaps. Perusing the literature on regional and town planning, then, Professor Tisdell would notice articles with titles like the present one [1] and others suggesting uncertainty or Kuhnean paradigmatic instability in the discipline (Kuhn, 1962) [2]. Consequently, the purpose here is to advance the present theoretical debate with a few prospective ideas. In this paper we review the current disquiet, trace its backdrops and contemporary directions, outline an appropriate focus for town planning and then explore its implications. Disquiet in the discipline The edifice of planning has been unstable for over 20 years. By the early 1970s, faith in earlier comprehensive planning had waned, along with the deterministic belief that improvements to physical environments could engineer change to benefit either the urban disadvantaged or social behaviour at large. Calls for plural rather than single plans expanded to incorporate citizen participation and empowerment and the idea arose that the activity of planners should be politicised to effect social change. Some academics embraced radical critiques of capitalism circulating in allied disciplines such as sociology. In city hall, however, these ideas were impracticable, producing a gulf between practitioners and theorists. The scope of planning broadened considerably, as both groups pursued their respective concerns. By 1973, one commentator noted that: the conception of “planning” held both among professional planners and in British society more generally has widened and is likely to go on widening, and ... partly in consequence the issues that will, over the next three decades, be thought of as problems for ‘planning’ and “planners” will be non-spatial as well as spatial (Willmott,1973, p. 10). If planning is everything or, rather, anything ... More problematically, Wildavsky (1973) argued from the level of national or strategic planning that planners were overwhelmed by the scope of their discipline, absorbed by their environment. Efforts to plan do not equate to actual success in planning since attempts no more represent planning “than the desire to be wise may be called wisdom ... promise must be dignified by performance ” (Wildavsky, 1973 p. 129). Definitions of planning characteristically separate goals from achievements or stress intention over accomplishment. Planning becomes a self-protecting hypothesis: as long as planners try to plan, it cannot be falsified. Wildavsky (1973, p. 138) thus asks what, if anything, has planning caused or made happen. “What, in the economist ’ s language, is the value added by planning”. That key question will be revisited later. A later critic, Reade (1983) recommends “cool and careful” analysis of whether there can exist a specific planning approach to public decision making. Does planning produce any outcomes which other social methods (e.g. voting, action of elites) cannot? Reade (1983, pp. 163-68) nominates nine criteria associated with planning. Five are intellectually credible but problematic: four are not intellectually credible. As to the former group, planning implies an explicit, desired outcome: yet either outcomes fail to materialise (d la Wildavsky) or policies change so quickly that outcomes cannot be realistically monitored [3]. Planning is oriented to the future, but this is presumptuous in that we cannot know our tastes or those of others in times to come. Planning allegedly makes greater use of