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Journal of the American Planning Association
ISSN: 0194-4363 (Print) 1939-0130 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpa20
Forecasting versus Envisioning: A New Window on
the Future
Martin Wachs
To cite this article: Martin Wachs (2001) Forecasting versus Envisioning: A�New�Window
on�the�Future , Journal of the American Planning Association, 67:4, 367-372, DOI:
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the toolkit for other members of the profession to use.
Only in this way can planners truly develop the profes-
sionalism needed to approach the topic of the future
with authority.
Current Contributions
The following group of essays on the future in plan-
ning extends our knowledge in important ways. Origi-
nally prepared as part of a panel discussion on the use
of the future in planning at the 1998 annual meeting of
the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, they
have been substantially revised for the present volume.
Neither individually nor collectively do these essays ad-
dress the comprehensive issue of the future in planning.
But each makes an important contribution that hope-
fully will stimulate the profession in different ways.
In “Forecasting versus Envisioning: A New Window
on the Future,” Martin Wachs addresses competing
metaphors for planners’ work that make distinct as-
sumptions about how we should approach the future.
He concludes with recommendations for how forecasts
should be used within a contemporary, collaborative ap-
proach to planning.
In “Dare to Dream: Bringing Futures into Plan-
ning,” Sam Cole explores the contributions that a fu-
tures orientation can bring to the planning profession.
As both a planner and a futurist, the author provides an
overview of the futures field, explaining its differences
from and similarities to the planning profession. He also
provides a guide to the rich resources offered by futures
studies. Many of the ideas of futurists may prove helpful
to planners who need to think about the longer run and
the broader implications of planning decisions.
My essay “Demographic Futures as a Guide to Plan-
ning: California’s Latinos and the Compact City” advo-
cates using demographic forecasts to more fully guide
urban planning. After explaining the general advantages
of the demographic approach, the essay presents the ex-
ample of the growing Latino population in California
and what it foretells about the future of the state. Fo-
cusing on the desired goal of building more compact cit-
ies, the analysis explores how Latinos’ higher-density liv-
ing arrangements and greater use of public transit might
alter future development patterns. Far from reaching a
definitive conclusion, this essay sketches the opportuni-
ties provided by following the demographic futures ap-
proach.
Taken together, these essays nudge planners for-
ward, urging a stronger grasp of the future in our work.
They demonstrate important insights and raise new
questions for others to pursue. Hopefully, the readers of
this journal will take up the challenge.
REFERENCES
ACSP Strategic Marketing Committee. (1997). Anchor points
for planning’s identification. Journal of Planning Education
and Research, 16, 223–224.
Helling, A. (1998). Collaborative visioning: Proceed with cau-
tion! Results from evaluating Atlanta’s Vision 2020 pro-
ject. Journal of the American Planning Association, 64, 335–
349.
Isserman, A. (1985). Dare to plan: An essay on the role of the
future in planning practice and education. Town Planning
Review, 56, 483–491.
Myers, D., & Kitsuse, A. (2000). Constructing the future in
planning: A survey of theories and tools. Journal of Plan-
ning Education and Research, 19, 221–231.
Forecasting versus
Envisioning
A New Window on the Future
Martin Wachs
In this essay I examine the ways in which the future has evolved from
sweeping vision to technocratic projection. I argue that despite the
centrality of a focus on the future in all of planning, forecasting alone
is an inadequate and unsatisfying way to arrive at a concept of the fu-
ture that can truly guide planning. In fact, projections of future needs
and costs have become instruments by which powerful interests justify
their efforts to impose their projects on the populace. I close by argu-
ing that modern forecasting methods nevertheless can be used to ex-
plore alternative futures and the planning policies that they imply or
suggest. In that way, forecasting can actually become a central part of
collaborative planning.
O
ne of the defining characteristics of planning as a
field is its concern for the future. While planners
differ from one another by focusing on housing,
the environment, economic development, or transpor-
tation systems, what we have in common is an orienta-
tion toward the future. And, as many have observed, our
understanding of planning has changed greatly over
time as planners’ concept of the future has itself changed.
APA Journal ◆Autumn 2001 ◆Vol. 67, No. 4 367
PUTTING THE FUTURE IN PLANNING
The Future as Seen in the Past
Many planners tell ourselves and our students that
in the early days of planning the field was dominated by
visionaries such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burn-
ham, Ebenezer Howard, Clarence Stein, and Rexford
Guy Tugwell who saw the future in bold outline. To
them, things should and would be different and better in
the future in ways that people could see and hear and
feel. Never mind that politics and economics got in the
way; their idealized futures and grand visions were guide-
posts for current actions. This utopian vision was also
the roadmap that planners used to navigate the present.
It was the inspiration to continue on the path toward a
brighter future no matter how many obstacles were en-
countered along the way.
Today we understand that this conception of plan-
ning history is in part truth and in large part myth. Early
planners had to be as responsive to the political pres-
sures of their day as modern planners must be today.
These icons of our field were, like us, trying to be effective
at their jobs, yet their master plans were rarely, if ever,
fully achieved, despite their ability to inspire and moti-
vate. When viewed through the lens of a grand master
plan, the future as utopia was a powerful metaphor that
gave their plans direction and purpose.
Many planners are nostalgic for the days of visionary
thinking and urge us to return to the utopianism that
characterized our roots (e.g., Isserman, 1985). By com-
parison to these historic visionaries, planners today have
in our thinking become “ordinary bureaucrats seeking
a secure career, some status, and regular increases in
salary” (Krumholz, 1983, p. 275). Michael Brooks, for ex-
ample, writing in this journal, stated:
In my view, we sorely need to return to the utopian
tradition in planning. The urban planning profes-
sion needs a new generation of visionaries, people
who dream of a better world, and who are capable
of designing the means to attain it. That, after all,
is the essence of planning: to visualize the ideal
future community, and to work toward its reali-
zation. It is a much-needed role in our cities, and
young men and women continue to enter the pro-
fession because they want to perform that role. Let
us nurture their instincts, and thereby restore the
urban planning profession to its historic mission.
(Brooks, 1988, p. 247)
Process Replaces the Grand Plan
Why do planners no longer think about the future in
visionary or utopian terms? There are a number of dif-
ferent explanations which can be seen as either compet-
ing or complementary. One reason might well be that
planning thought has evolved from concentrating on
end states to focusing on processes. Planners today de-
fine ourselves using different metaphors than we did a
hundred years ago. The master plan is no longer our holy
grail, but planning is everything. We have rejected physi-
cal determinism; few of us today think it is adequate or
even appropriate to envision master plans as the most
highly prized products of our work. Instead, our goal is
to increase access to the planning process and to ensure
that those with the power to make consequential deci-
sions hear and listen to many voices. We are more con-
cerned with establishing the legitimacy of multiple vi-
sions than we are with pursuing any one of them. Thus,
we focus less on the intellectual and motivational power
of clear, coherent—and inevitably elitist—visions of the
future than on ways to encourage the increasing number
of participants in planning processes to foster many dif-
ferent visions.
We could think of this new direction as a different
kind of vision, but its open, participatory, messy proc-
esses lack the motivational power inherent in master
plans. Goals of diversity are hard to rally around; it is in-
herently more difficult to reify multiple goals than a uni-
tary image of the future. No wonder some of us are nos-
talgic for visionary notions of the future. Our futures
today seem timid and lack inspirational power, no mat-
ter how well meaning they may be. Furthermore, this
emphasis on multiple visions leaves us with the difficult
task of resolving differences and finding compromises
among competing visions. Unlike the grand physical
master plans of the past, today’s process of inclusion and
compromise seems to be almost the antithesis of vision-
ary thinking.
Futures are Forecast Rather than
Envisioned
Another reason that vision has receded from the
planning horizon may well be that after World War II,
the earlier dominance over planning thought and uni-
versity education by architects and designers shifted to
the current prominence of analytical thinking by applied
social scientists and engineers. The future is no longer
envisioned, but rather is forecast using elaborate data-
bases, mathematical models, and algorithms. From re-
gional plans to proposals for public facilities to plans for
private developments, the starting point for public dis-
cussion is typically a forecast of demand for use and pub-
lic or private cost. A technical forecast to be accommo-
dated by professional activity is extremely different from
a vision to be fulfilled by bold action.
MARTIN WACHS
368 APA Journal ◆Autumn 2001 ◆Vol. 67, No. 4
The Role of Technical Analysis
Forecasting is almost the opposite of visionary
thinking. Plans today are descriptions of courses of ac-
tion and enumerations of facilities that are needed to ac-
commodate forecasts of changes in population, travel,
residential needs, office space, and the like. Most often,
plans are responses to forecasts of potential problems—
for example, unless some action is taken, there will be a
housing shortage; unless an intervention is planned,
water pollution will worsen; if no airport plans are made,
there will be long travel delays.
Furthermore, to the extent that they depict future
conditions, forecasts provide dry, technocratic images
that hardly have the power to motivate committed re-
sponses. Elaborate databases and complex mathematical
models are used, and the reports in which the forecasts
are presented are weighty and dominated by technical
jargon, equations, graphs, and tables. They are often pre-
pared by consultants or highly trained technical staff of
public agencies. The forecasts that justify plans for tran-
sit systems, dams, power plants, or regional shopping
centers may have been prepared by dozens of specialists
using computer software packages that others have de-
veloped and geographic information systems that still
others have assembled. Forecasts of retail sales at a po-
tential shopping center or patronage on a proposed tran-
sit line are the consequence of mathematical models that
use as inputs the results of a chain of other forecasts. For
example, forecasts of employment and economic growth
rely on the results of still other forecasts of population
growth, which rely upon the results of yet other forecasts
of migration and birth rates and death rates. Most com-
monly, forecasts are actually projections. Using recent
trends in many underlying causal variables, the future
values of some other dependent variables are modeled.
Since all the causal variables are presumed to be follow-
ing their historical trends, the forecast is not a vision of
the future at all—it is rather a foreseeable consequence
of intersecting trends.
The politicians and administrators who commis-
sion forecasts rarely understand them and often quote
their conclusions without subjecting them to critical re-
view. They tend to repeatedly cite the projections that
support their positions while ignoring those that do not.
Lay citizens and public interest groups rarely have the
technical expertise, the time, or the budget to repeat, ver-
ify, analyze, or critique complex forecasts. Nevertheless,
plans for the physical development of communities, the
provision of public and social services, and the improve-
ment of environmental conditions all treat forecasts as
the starting point for planning. And, rather than claim-
ing that forecasts incorporate vision or creativity, plan-
ners assert their validity by citing the complexity and so-
phistication of the models. We assert that our forecasts,
rather than being right because they incorporate appro-
priate values and goals, are appropriate and useful be-
cause they are the products of scientific or mathematical
models that encapsulate empirical truths instead of our
subjective ideals.
The Role of Assumptions
Sophistication in the techniques of forecasting,
however, is more apparent than real because of the criti-
cal role of assumptions (Wachs, 1990). While equations,
computers, and databases give forecasts an aura of sci-
entific complexity which invests them with a certain
amount of authority in the political arena, the most crit-
ical inputs needed to make a forecast often consist of as-
sumptions about the future. The simplest population
forecast, which might employ any one of many different
mathematical models, will depend to a greater extent on
assumptions than on the particular model that is em-
ployed. Will future birth and death rates be the same as
those in the recent past? Will migration rates rise or fall?
We often assume that recent trends will continue for a
decade or more, thus turning a simple projection of past
trends into our most authoritative forecast. But, of
course, such assumptions are not based on knowledge
of what those trends will actually be. William Asher
(1978), an expert on forecasting methods, asserts that
the core assumptions underlying a forecast almost al-
ways play a larger role in determining the outcome of the
forecast than does the complexity or sophistication of
the forecasting model that is employed. Computers are
used because these models contain many variables, a
great deal of data, many units of analysis, and several
time periods. The planners who do this work have re-
ceived advanced training in computer modeling, but
they have no special knowledge of the future. In the end,
their forecasts are merely elaborations of the conse-
quences of numerous assumed trends, and, in the end,
they are not much more likely to be right than simpler
forecasts made in earlier times using more primitive
methods (Wachs, 1989).
Blatant Abuse of Forecasts
The accuracy of a forecast cannot be verified unless
the time period for which it was made has passed and
until the action it was used to evaluate has been taken.
Thus, if some political purpose was being served by mak-
ing a forecast, that forecast need not really be correct in
order for it to have its intended effect. For example, if we
predict that a housing shortage will be critical in 20 years
unless action is taken today to build a new stock of hous-
APA Journal ◆Autumn 2001 ◆Vol. 67, No. 4 369
PUTTING THE FUTURE IN PLANNING
ing, the effect will be construction of the housing,
whether or not the shortage materializes. In order to ver-
ify that the forecast was correct, we would have to wait 20
years. Furthermore, if the result of the forecast was a pol-
icy intervention, it is impossible to know whether the
forecast conditions would have come to pass without
that intervention.
Planners and policymakers know that forecasts are
politically influential and that their accuracy is difficult
or impossible to prove. They are also technically com-
plex and difficult for the public and elected officials to
understand. Thus, for decades planners have used fore-
casts to promote interventions that they consider desir-
able for a wide range of purposes. A development pro-
ject is more likely to be approved if its advocates show
that it satisfies an anticipated overwhelming growth in
demand and can be built at modest cost. If the passage of
time shows that the demand was exaggerated and the
cost underestimated, those who made the forecast are
not held liable for the expenditures of public resources
that their studies helped to promote. This is true in part
because so many different people participated in mak-
ing the forecast that it is literally impossible to hold any
individual responsible (Thompson, 1980). For example,
forecasts of dramatic increases in the demand for elec-
tric power justified enormous public expenditures on
nuclear power plants by electric utilities that later went
into bankruptcy when the anticipated growth in de-
mand failed to eventuate. Several authors have docu-
mented the extent to which forecasts of future patronage
of urban rail systems have been inflated and forecasts of
those systems’ costs have been underestimated in order
to gain political support and federal grants for projects
which later proved to be far less cost effective (Kain,
1990; Pickrell, 1992). In his biography of Robert Moses,
Robert Caro (1975) detailed the ways in which Moses
masterfully misrepresented future demand for and costs
of the facilities he advocated in the New York metropol-
itan area. And recent news reports make it seem that the
cost overruns associated with the “Big Dig” in Boston
are but another example of self-serving forecasts that
misrepresent the truth.
Neutral Expert or Advocate?
The roles planners play in forecasting also reveal one
of the internal contradictions that characterize our pro-
fession. By carrying out forecasts as scientific and tech-
nical exercises, we are to a great extent ascribing to a
model of planning that is value neutral. Assumptions
made to operationalize models are thought to be appro-
priate technical judgments and not efforts to promote
the purposes of particular interests or to favor particular
communities over others. In this role, the job of plan-
ners is to accommodate the growth that is forecast and
to serve the projected demand for services; evaluation
tools such as benefit-cost analysis provide a rationale by
which to accomplish these tasks. Their decision-making
framework values economic efficiency and judges the
needs of all groups to be equal. On the other hand, the
idea that planning is all about process and access gives a
different message. According to this idea of planning,
planners are activists who seek to advocate on behalf of
interest groups, particularly those, like the poor and mi-
nority populations of our cities, who have the least pow-
erful voices when it comes to the allocation of societal
resources.
Over many years, Howe and Kaufman (1981) sur-
veyed planning practitioners about a number of scenar-
ios that typified situations likely to be encountered in
planning practice. They were able to classify planners on
the basis of their responses. Some planners clearly saw
themselves as “technicians,” neutral experts whose role
was to analyze, model, project, and objectively solve
problems on the basis of this information. Others saw
themselves as “advocates” or activists who saw the core
values of planning as promoting the interests of client
groups. Interestingly, a third group of planners emerged
who internalized some of the characteristics of both
groups. Howe and Kaufman called these people “hy-
brids” because they sometimes responded as technicians
and sometimes as advocates.
It is possible to interpret Howe and Kaufman’s anal-
ysis in two ways. On one hand, it could well be that plan-
ners internalize some of the values of each group, at-
tempting to function sometimes as unbiased, objective
technical experts and other times as advocates. It is cer-
tainly possible that different situations call for different
types of behavior in this regard. An alternative interpre-
tation, however, could be that we vacillate between these
roles, uncertain of whether we should aspire to one or
the other.
The lack of clarity in planners’ roles partly explains
the dilemma described above. If a forecast is merely an
enumeration of complementary and intersecting trends
and assumptions are simply technical judgments about
the parameters of forecasting models, then the planners
who execute these forecasts can be characterized as neu-
tral experts. If it is understood that the assumptions that
underlie forecasts are the most critical ingredients and
that they dominate methods in determining outcomes,
it is possible to characterize a forecast as an exercise in
advocacy. Better yet, if one understands the power of as-
sumptions to determine the outcome of a forecast and
realizes that it is impossible to verify the correctness of a
forecast until the target date has arrived, then one can
MARTIN WACHS
370 APA Journal ◆Autumn 2001 ◆Vol. 67, No. 4
be an even more effective advocate by asserting that one
is merely an objective technical expert. In other words,
the most effective way for a planner to impose his or her
values on a plan is by asserting that he or she is merely
carrying out a value-neutral process of forecasting, while
in fact adjusting the assumptions of the forecast to pro-
duce preferred outcomes. Experience has taught many
planners, then, that hypocrisy can be a defining charac-
teristic of the work of the effective professional planner.
Metaphors and Role Conflicts
Earlier, I described as a metaphor the visionary
thinking contained in the master plans of the 19th cen-
tury. In the 20th century, different metaphors arose that
emphasize planning as a participatory process that re-
lies on technical or scientific analysis. Despite the change
in our metaphors, we retain a nostalgic attachment to
the vision we associate with the master planning era.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) have ar-
gued that metaphors are far more than linguistic devices
of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish.
They believe that human thought processes are largely
metaphoric and that metaphors are basic principles by
which we organize our conceptions of the world. We
simplify complex phenomena through metaphors and
rely upon them as guides for action.
The concept of metaphor helps us to understand the
role conflict inherent in planners’ views of the future and
that, I fear, remains one of the defining characteristics
of our field. On one hand, we long to be visionaries,
imagining and creating the future as a creative product
of our idealism. On the other hand, we see ourselves as
technocrats, asserting that the future is the inevitable
consequence of interacting trends and planning is the
process of accommodating forecasts of forces that are
beyond our control. These roles are clearly in conflict,
and that gives us a great deal of discomfort. As advocates
we try to shape the future, and as technicians we try to
forecast and merely accommodate it. Uncertain of which
metaphor defines us best, we vacillate, and as a result we
sometimes engage in duplicitous behavior.
Forecasts and Collaborative
Planning
As the new century begins, the reigning metaphor
among planning theorists is collaborative planning. In
this model, many perspectives are brought to the deci-
sion-making arena by legitimate interests, and the plan-
ner must find a path that respects and responds to them
through an open process of give and take. In this model,
what is the place of the technician who prepares fore-
casts of the future on the basis of standard forecasting
methods and appropriate assumptions?
On one hand, modern views of planning have re-
placed both the paradigm of planning based on techni-
cal forecasts and that of visionary master planning, each
of which results in a unitary vision of the future. We now
live in a world in which competing concepts of the fu-
ture and competing plans are hopefully to be equally re-
spected. On the other hand, advances in geographic in-
formation systems, computer modeling, and mastery by
planners of increasingly sophisticated statistical meth-
ods need not be irrelevant to policymaking.
Proponents of collaborative planning have not been
friendly to the role that technical forecasting has played
in planning. Critics of the application of quantitative
analysis to planning do not assert, however, that analyt-
ical models are inherently irrelevant to decision making
(Friedmann, 1973). Rather, they dispute the view put for-
ward by many traditional planning technicians that fore-
casting methods yield an unavoidable truth that must
be heeded. We know that assumptions are critical to
forecasts no matter how sophisticated their technical
characteristics may be, and that different forecast as-
sumptions are more satisfying to different interest
groups. Interactive and collaborative planning need not
ignore technical forecasts. A collaborative planning
process can incorporate competing plans derived from
different forecasts based on alternative assumptions and
a wider range of modeling outputs produced by those
assumptions. Collaborative planning would benefit
greatly from the capacity to test alternative assumptions
and different model parameters in accordance with dif-
ferent preferences and understandings of the partici-
pants. Such a process could use insights from the appli-
cation of complex databases and analytical models as
long as those techniques are seen as tools for the elabo-
ration of competing assumptions.
Forecasters have frequently been criticized for fail-
ing to enumerate their assumptions and for stating the
results of their forecasts without presenting measures of
the forecasts’ sensitivities to changes in the input para-
meters. Modern computing gives us greater capacity to
test alternative forecasts and to vary input parameters
systematically. The ultimate subjectivity of forecasts
need no longer be defined as a shortcoming. In the hands
of intelligent analysts, this characteristic of forecasts can
and should make them far more useful to collaborative
planning analyses and decision-making processes.
Rather than thinking of a forecast as a defined and in-
variant input upon which to base a plan, it is far more
realistic to see it as an enumeration of the consequences
of a particular set of assumptions that can be varied to
reflect the competing interests of contending parties.
APA Journal ◆Autumn 2001 ◆Vol. 67, No. 4 371
PUTTING THE FUTURE IN PLANNING
The future is not a single grand vision or an inevitable
consequence of trends, but rather an object of manipu-
lation, discussion, debate, and eventually, perhaps, even
consensus.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable comments
that were made by Dowell Myers and Anthony Brinkman on
an early draft of this article.
REFERENCES
Asher, W. (1978). Forecasting: An appraisal for policy-makers and
planners. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brooks, M. P. (1988). Four critical junctures in the history of
the urban planning profession: An exercise in hindsight.
Journal of the American Planning Association, 54, 241–248.
Caro, R. A. (1975). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of
New York. New York: Vintage Books.
Friedmann, J. (1973). Retracking America: A theory of transactive
planning. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Howe, E., & Kaufman, J. (1981). The values of contemporary
American planners. Journal of the American Planning Associ-
ation, 47, 266–278.
Isserman, A. M. (1985). Dare to plan: An essay on the role of the
future in planning practice and education. Town Planning
Review, 56(4), 483–491.
Kain, J. F. (1990). Deception in Dallas: Strategic misrepresen-
tation in rail transit promotion and evaluation. Journal of
the American Planning Association, 56, 184–196.
Krumholz, N. (1983). A retrospective view of equity planning:
Cleveland 1969–1979. In D. A. Krueckeberg (Ed.), Intro-
duction to planning history in the United States (pp. 258–302).
New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research,
Rutgers University.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Pickrell, D. H. (1992). A desire named streetcar: Fantasy and
fact in rail transit planning. Journal of the American Plan-
ning Association, 58, 158–176.
Thompson, D. F. (1980). Moral responsibility of public offi-
cials: The problem of many hands. American Political Sci-
ence Review, 74, 905–916.
Wachs, M. (1989). When planners lie with numbers. Journal of
the American Planning Association, 55, 476–480.
Wachs, M. (1990). Ethics and advocacy in forecasting for pub-
lic policy. Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 9(1 & 2),
141–157.
Dare to Dream
Bringing Futures into Planning
Sam Cole
Futures studies and planning follow parallel and sometimes overlap-
ping paths. Both are idealistic activities seeking to make people’s fu-
tures more secure and more fulfilling. Many futurists wish that their
dreams could be implemented, and many planners dream that their
work could be less shortsighted and parochial. If only to fulfill these
needs, these groups should pay more attention to each other. In this
article, I attempt to strengthen the bridge between futurists and plan-
ners. My observations come from the perspective of someone with a
professional and pedagogical interest in both planning and futures
studies. I illustrate past, current, and potential contributions of fu-
tures studies to planning as follows: (1) the beginnings of futures stud-
ies in science fiction films, journals, and international development;
(2) the role of envisioning, polling, and forecasting methods; and (3)
the challenges of linking futures studies methods to planning. I then
argue for a diverse approach in terms of methods and participants
and assert that if planners are to embrace the future, their plans must
begin with the future.
I
n a provocative article “Dare to Plan: An Essay on the
Role of the Future in Planning Practice and Educa-
tion” Andrew Isserman (1985) remonstrated that
planners may well have lost sight of the future. He en-
treated planners to become experts in the study of
change—past, present, and future—and to begin to de-
velop methods for studying the future. It is not evident
that planners have heeded his admonition. In the United
States there is, at best, a growing recognition of the need
for more imaginative thinking about the future in urban
planning. This is witnessed by recent book titles such as
Visions for a New American Dream (Nelessen, 1994) pub-
lished by the APA Planners Press and also by the topic of
the 1998 Association of American Collegiate Planners
conference, “Tomorrow’s Cities Today—Building for the
Future.” Unfortunately, there is still rather little “future”
in contemporary planning education and practice. In
particular, while many U.S. planning schools are intro-
ducing courses dealing with globalization and teaching
forecasting techniques, few have futures studies courses
or a futures specialization. It is not surprising, therefore,
that Dowell Myers and Alicia Kitsuse (1998) recently
have reiterated Isserman’s plea.
MARTIN WACHS / SAM COLE
372 APA Journal ◆Autumn 2001 ◆Vol. 67, No. 4
