Abstract
The concepts utopia, scenario, and plan offer important ways to envision the future of place. Utopia describes the perfect, complete place. Scenario compares good alternative stories. Plans offer useful provisional intentions. All three help us imagine how future consequences of select actions might influence current expectations and hopes. I argue that pragmatism can integrate all three along a continuum from holistic inclusive to selective incremental. Utopia dramatizes emotional attachments to the daily details of a purposeful way of life for some future imagined place. Scenario describes the confluence of narrative and explanation, story and cause as coherent testable accounts of relevant consequences for plausible futures. Plan describes how we compose and compare alternatives to inform practical intentions for choices and decisions for immediate problems we currently face. Framing the three concepts pragmatically avoids the contrast between utopian rupture and narrative continuity by treating both as complementary aspects of a practical imagination. Composing plans requires adaptive attention to specific features of people and place susceptible to purposeful change.
Keywords
Introduction
Most people and the organizations they inhabit take action to anticipate and prepare for future uncertainty. Many wait and respond to what fate dishes out either within the framework of familiar tradition or some variation. Faith guides the way and not purposeful deliberation. I am writing to an audience of spatial planners (professionals and others) and scholars for whom deliberation guides judgment. In this article, I explore three popular concepts used to guide the purposeful response to the future for a place: utopia, scenario, and plan. I argue that viewed pragmatically the challenging vision of utopia does not differ fundamentally from the insights offered in scenarios and plans. All three offer imaginative advice assessing the future as a prelude for action. Paying attention to this continuity invites plan makers (professionals as well as other stakeholders) to integrate the demands of utopia as part of the expectation for practical planning rather than an exceptional exercise that ignores the relevance of current opportunities and constraints.
Planning theorists want to include practical judgment at the center of planning, but they tend to privilege knowledge over action. As much as I have learned from both Patsy Healey (2010) and John Friedmann (2011), I think both lead us astray as they urge us to believe that planning turns knowledge into action and that knowing utopian ideals will inspire aspirations for a new way of life that fit these ideals. I will make the case in this article that a pragmatic approach does not rely on this gap. The claim that we need a strong utopian vision to provide a compelling attachment to a desirable future place sets off alarms for the pragmatist who rejects that ideas compel consent. The pragmatist account treats utopias as imagined places where specific ways of life reconcile current problems while suspending the commitments to many current constraints. Utopias, scenarios, and plans all do inspirational work along the same cognitive path. The moral changes and policy improvements described in the stories and arguments that compose each become less demanding and more feasible moving from utopia to plan. All remain relevant because they are tied to practical concerns about the differences imagined changes might make to current ways of life.
The pragmatic approach
I adopt a pragmatic orientation tied to the ideas first proposed by the American philosophers Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. These thinkers assimilated the methods of scientific inquiry and the insights of Darwin’s conception of evolution to shift philosophy from a quest for certainty about scientific, moral, and practical judgment to the study of how well ideas contribute to practical adaptability to a complex and changing world. A pragmatic outlook turns the sort of stark dualisms that had animated philosophical debate (e.g. facts or values, idealism or realism, art or science, objective or subjective) into a range of conceptual differences arrayed along layers of continua people use to make sense of the world, conceive problems, form judgments, and take actions. The arguments about order, pattern, norms, and other ideas about human purpose and activity focus on the consequences these ideas yield as people put them to use. The pragmatist does not believe that philosophical reflection will uncover some fundamental truth beyond what human activity and learning has made possible. They avoid metaphors like discovering the underlying truth. We cannot know what the future holds for us with certainty before we enter that future.
The pragmatists, especially Dewey, recognized the salience of planning as a crucial feature of human intelligence. The reflective imaginative conception and comparison of alternative actions in the face of some problem enables humans to move beyond risky trial-and-error learning on the ground. The pragmatists focus on human learning because they recognized that each person develops his or her capacity to plan as part of a culture and community. Plans contribute to the usefulness of our ideas for the multitude of actions we take together from cooking a meal to debating a policy. Pragmatists treat planning as a feature of learning—learning that animates and accompanies all kinds of purposeful human action.
Pragmatism, however, seems anachronistic and uninspired. The attraction of utopian-inspired vision and explicit moral doctrines seems so much more attractive (Bauman, 1976; Eaton, 2002). Planning theorists use the concept of utopia to describe a kind of place detached from the gritty unpleasant features of the current scene—a place that reconciles social conflicts within an imagined spatial order. When John Friedmann (2000) focused on the good city many decades ago and more recently in a response to Manuel Castells, he conceives utopia as a radical departure from current conventions and possibilities. The utopian vision must preclude the pragmatic approach with its presumptive attention to context and purpose. How could a pragmatist imagine a radical alternative without making it fit into the limited bounds of current norms and purposes?
I want to show how the pragmatic approach described briefly above can allow for and embrace the radical rupture of utopia without abandoning the practical demands of the problems at hand. This requires recognizing the crucial insight of the pragmatic approach—that we humans already use planning as an inescapable resource for any judgment we take for problem solving or future gazing. The conceptual contrast comes from a common misunderstanding of pragmatism as a kind of rational instrumentalism—a version of utilitarianism that inspires the sort of social engineering that confidently calculates future benefits for alternative plans. Another critique casts pragmatists as liberal incrementalists deeply wedded to feasible compromise at the lowest common denominator of political agreement. Still others treat the pragmatic approach as process focused and abstract, unable to offer specific advice about what to do.
I think the pragmatic approach can encourage people to inhabit visionary temptations as citizens, students, and professionals imagining new forms of civic life and practical virtue. As people learn about the moral and cultural details of cases and places that imaginatively resolve pressing problems, they can find room for action and change. The pragmatist spatial planner will communicate the utopian place in imaginative stories or in critical discourse, interpretation, and debate. Communicate with empathy and solidarity (what difference will this make for your future?), if not fidelity (where will you fit in this future world?), offering alternatives that challenge the tradition of existing trends and current constraints. On this account, utopia loses status as a compelling vision, becoming instead especially detailed conception of a future place at one end of a long continuum of practical possibilities. The pragmatist does not want to hand off popular consent to a vision conceived by someone else, no matter how perfect the vision may seem.
Three concepts for guiding us toward the future
Utopia
Planning theorists use the concept of utopia to describe a future place that reconciles current social, political, and economic problems within a single spatial community. The imagined space for settlement describes current problematic relationships as forms and types of activity and accomplishment that replace familiar problems with new ways of life. These ways of life consist of detailed relationships represented in the utopian landscape and narrative as successful and fulfilling. The details of the imagined garden, village, town, or city replace social competition with cooperation, exploitation with justice, squalor with beauty, selfishness with generosity, and so much more. The utopian place has a long lineage.
Utopia envisions how purposeful changes flow from compliance with inclusive doctrines. Utopias describe landscapes where diverse human inclinations, impulses, desires, and unfinished edges find closure and significance. The Old Testament Genesis story of Eden proclaims the innocence of Adam and Eve before they ate from the tree of knowledge. They inhabit a garden that fulfills their needs. Neither of them experience uncertainty, scarcity, or conflict. The Genesis story of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam describes Adam and Eve’s life in a garden landscape—a place that supports the union of the human family with a single all-powerful God who designed both people and place. These human creatures had it all. Life was perfect. But they cast it aside by violating the one prohibition that God had set—do not eat fruit from the tree of knowledge. This original sin unleashed the inclinations and desires that fuel human curiosity, trouble making, and ultimately death. Satan tempted Eve to try the fruit, but this could only work because Eve could choose to disobey God. The devil’s clever temptations awaken a dormant autonomy. The exercise of choice destroys the perfect union, leaving future generations vulnerable to death. The return to paradise in heaven will require an act of God.
Once, long ago, I was trained as a scripture scholar. I learned the art of hermeneutics as I struggled to discern what portion of a scriptural text was genuinely inspired revelation and what portion the product of human intention and interpretation. This effort to disclose the kernel of inspired truth remains a central pre-occupation in epistemological analysis that treats language and culture as delivery systems for some grander meaning beyond human authorship. Utopia aspires to this kind of authenticity suspended beyond the reach of human fallibility and corruptibility. Utopia imposes a moral horizon that anticipates and delivers perfection.
On this account the audience does not discover utopia. The author fashions a future landscape that consists of layers of meaning the audience inhabits vicariously as a way of life. Utopia invites the audience to journey to an ideal place, leaving behind the current troubling details of the present. Unlike self-improvement literature that details all manner of individual strategies we each might adopt to command a tumultuous environment, utopias envision social life in a place whose inhabitants already combine many ambitious goals showing how they should work together in unison. Utopian details inspire interest and hope as the audience can witness in these the consequences of animating ideals.
Utopias work their motivational magic not only through literary, philosophical, or theoretical means but as images that bind human expectations to a vision of future. Despite the record of failure, utopia persists as an attractive option clothing ideals in familiar yet unblemished landscapes. The snapshot of the composed order for a perfect place ironically taps and fuels discontent with the present even as prospects for inhabiting such a place seemingly remain unlikely. In modern industrial and postindustrial times, architecture remains especially susceptible to the attraction of utopia because the artistry of physical design attends to the salient layers of built space. The artistic rendering of a purposefully designed place not only includes those formal elements of composition that answer to beauty (the elegant geometry of the lines) but also combines the social and cultural meanings within the visual scene, landscape, park, garden, or other imagined place. The designed image attracts viewer attention and commitment. The final rendering offers a complete vision as all the earlier versions sketched and compromised disappear before and beneath it (Eaton, 2002; Rosenau, 1983).
I briefly compare two analysts from different scholarly traditions within planning theory who adopt vivid and compelling arguments for pursuing utopian ideals imagining the outcomes such efforts will produce for the places people live: John Friedmann and Emily Talen. Friedmann develops his conception of future urban outcomes at the societal scale. He traces his guiding ideals to societal movements for social justice in light of changing forms of urbanization. The geographic features of place do not animate his conception of imagined social outcomes, but channel and shape the conditions for their emergence. For instance, in his future, people obtain adequate housing security as the system for social and economic provision changes to reduce inequality across social divides and geographic places (Friedmann, 2011).
Talen (2005) imagines future places emerging from the spatial arrangement of urban spaces. The guiding ideals combine conceptions of urbanism tied to professional movements in design and planning for places. The geographic configuration of space contributes importantly to imagined outcomes. For example, the proper combination of density, mix of use, and street configuration reduces travel times and costs as it fosters local social cohesion.
Despite their difference in approach, both authors imagine ideal future outcomes for places that anticipate a shift in political and institutional governance. The knowledge and focus for each varies in scale and form; but they converge in projecting expectations that not only describe ideal outcomes but authorize them. Both argue for ideals strong enough to govern how places and people interact in the future. Ironically, neither author exhibits single-minded doctrinal fidelity to the ideals they describe. Each in their related scholarship study the complexity of institutional planning and how current ideas undermine hopes for the ideals they champion.
Scenario
Scenarios like utopias rely on narrative, but the purposes in the plot reflect the expectations of scripted stakeholders for each future. Scenarios offer plausible comparable options that project and evaluate interaction effects tied to specific expectations and assumptions about a future time and place. The compressed version is a proverb, the longer version a vignette or short story (Zapata, 2007).
Storytelling and the narratives that the telling inspires animates the future with characters involved in plots susceptible to modification and reversal. Most of us experience life as a journey generating memories fueled by the language and culture we each inhabit. As we cast our glance backward we author our past selectively to make sense of current practice. If we failed a friend or betrayed a promise, we might revise what we regret offering a counterfactual account. If only I had offered assistance or kept my word, I might have avoided the consequences that fuel my anguish. The explosion of research on human cognition and memory provides empirical grounds for the tacit scenario building each conduct as we reconsider and revise prior judgments. As we recognize the active role we each play shaping our joint destiny we may reconsider our responsibility for past events. The inertia of familiar habits and conventions diminishes this sensibility. Counterfactual accounts revising memories of prior events can prepare us to respond to future events. Vivid disciplined storytelling about the future can offer prototypes for living together in a place that complement or trump the precedent of prior arrangements (Albrechts, 2005; Bruner, 2002; Mandelbaum, 1991; Throgmorton, 1996, 2003).
The creation of scenarios combines the selection of several causal attributes that frame the contours of change for a place, for instance, climate change and economic prosperity. The authors then conceive and project the goals of a local clientele as different plots that describe what might be done in the future to cope with the change. Comparing the scenarios that result informs the judgments that the clientele take now to prepare for an uncertain local future (Hopkins and Zapata, 2007). Instead of seeking a story that will ground our future in a perfect place, spatial planners use scenarios to selectively compose and compare alternatives to inform current choice about what to do to prepare now for the imagined future.
The scenario concept was adapted by planners seeking to remedy the limits that accompanied the application of rational scientific methods to decision making within modern global corporations. Herman Kahn borrowed the concept of a plot summary for a novel or play to describe the narrative account of future consequences for alternative organization decision paths (Kahn and Weiner, 1967). Scenario plans combine simulations used by generals, engineers, and managers to compare the effects of possible strategies with the complexity of social meaning and choice. Among spatial planners scenarios offer plausible accounts of future events tied to current choices about cause and purpose. The narratives invite users to compare how changes entailed by different causal and moral assumptions combine to shape the contours channeling consequences for select actors. The collaborative scenario invites the participation of current stakeholders reviewing assumptions and crafting the plot interactively. Instead of seeking the best scenario as a guide for practice, participants learn to compare several scenarios obtaining improved insight about the complex interaction effects of their guiding assumptions within competing narratives.
Scenarios describe possible futures not necessarily desirable or predictable ones. They describe the process of change for a place as a contingent narrative whose imagined outcomes tell us more about current beliefs and unexpected interactions than setting a clear path for action. Lew Hopkins puts it this way: Expanding the use of scenarios from simple preference selection among multiple scenarios to creating and maintaining multiple plausible narratives about the uncertain future allows planners to explore the range of possibilities scenario planning offers. Spatial planners can employ scenarios as a way of discovering unknown or poorly understood interrelationships or use scenarios to engage broader public input into planning processes. Planners can make use of scenarios to help differing interest or social groups understand one another’s experiences in a particular place and their concerns and ideas about the future … (Hopkins and Zapata, 2007: 12)
Scenario offers a much less morally ambitious concept for judging the future than utopia. First, their users must adopt the outlook of the analyst for whom stories lose their bonds with doctrine and belief. We do not inhabit the scenario we create, but create stories that help us compare what kinds of world we might make and then inhabit. Second, the scenarios do not rely upon a sensitive grasp of cultural history and literary style, but a critical comprehension of relevant assumptions about change and the ability to animate these assumptions using narrative conventions to explore plausible effects related to the context at hand. The scenario maker must create each narrative fairly and transparently. The discipline of detached comparison requires that the author recognize the contingency of his or her own beliefs and possess detachment of judgment which is needed to craft the episodes and outcomes that faithfully portray the beliefs of others.
Since most scenario makers are neither novelists nor playwrights, spatial planners make scenarios in settings that include diverse stakeholders representing different interests, pursuing multiple goals. The drafting of comparable episodes includes the input of a diverse audience who can competently critique and revise drafts to improve plausibility and reduce bias. Sharing and comparing stories improves cognitive grip and emotional attachment, and so elaborates the meanings different futures may offer.
Spatial planners use scenarios to enliven imagined counterfactual story plots that study how different strategies might resolve anticipated uncertainties for the future of a place. The scenario allows the professionals and participating stakeholders to explore different responses to the complex conditions and causes that threaten current habits, conventions, and purposes. What differences in future housing provision availability and spatial pattern might emerge for different changes in the relationship between energy costs and population migration for the region? But scenarios may also be used to imagine how people adopting explicit normative principles and goals might respond to forecast conditions and causes. If we adopt an equity approach to housing provision, what differences will this make given the conditions we anticipate for the region? (Holway et al., 2012). Either way, the users interpret the differences across narratives to consider how current decisions might generate better outcomes for the forecast future.
Plan
Plans provide options that we compose and compare how consequences might ensue for each. The urgent push of desire, the rational tug of belief, or any problem that disrupts habit and convention stimulates planning. Plans encompass both a wider range of activities and a looser set of constraints than utopias or scenarios. Narrative episodes and spatial patterns emerge in plans as shorthand tied to conceptual inquiry describing the origins of a place and then setting out alternative strategies, policies, or designs to shape intentions toward the future at hand.
Most spatial plans prepared by professionals describe goals and existing conditions at the outset. Then the plan includes some appraisal of these conditions in relation to sponsor and client objectives. Next come proposals for the future—alternatives that the plan audience compares before making a decision: plausible imaginative simulations of future consequences and effects. Finally, the plan concludes with a recommendation or less decisive proposal guiding the decision of the sponsors and clientele. These conclusions may describe specific policies, programs, or actions that stakeholders to a plan may adopt to make good on the decision they take. The plan works if the sponsors and stakeholders take some of the advice, using it to change purpose and goals into practical intentions. Implementation turns intentions into commitments as stakeholders make decisions and adopt strategies to fit the context of a specific situation and place. If they enjoy time and money, they might assess the meaning of a policy, program, or an action by simulating strategies and testing the sensitivity of the consequences for each. Often stakeholders must act without the benefit of simulation. The plan may still offer good advice for its sponsors and clientele even if these stakeholders never find the means to implement it (Hoch, 2012). This sounds familiar to the planning theory audience.
The rational model with all its well-documented flaws abstracted this cognitive activity from the context of learning and use (Baum, 1996; Dalton, 1986). The revival of pragmatism among planning theorists rejected this rationalization (Healey, 2009). Pragmatically speaking, spatial planners do not need a theory about planning to justify what they do. Planning does not require epistemic justification based on method and rationality—but a practical (i.e. politically savvy, culturally aware, socially astute, etc.) justification that offers credible, plausible, and useful beliefs about the world as it is and how purposeful change may matter. Spatial planners use a diverse assortment of techniques and tools for manipulating information about complex urban systems and behavior. The tools need to be properly calibrated and reviewed, but practically rather than theoretically. The population projection, the economic forecast, the land use suitability assessment, and other similar studies do not uncover the truth of the city, but provide ordered relationships that plausibly frame future conditions—frames that rely upon judgments that combine future expectations, prior assumptions, and current observations. Plans order urban complexity in ways that inform the choices we make about current polices, practices, and behavior. Spatial planners compose these frames with specific audiences in mind. That is how spatial planners can interpret the meaning of the goals and plausibly relate these to the contextual conditions of a specific situation. Spatial planners do not make the plan for a universal, godlike audience, but for specific audiences. So as they compose judgments that frame future conditions, planners anticipate the responses to these forecast changes and use knowledge of these estimated and imagined interaction effects to modify expectations, assumptions, and observations. The objectivity of spatial planning comes from the quality of this composition rather than any imagined capacity to form judgments exclusive of a specific audience (Hoch, 2007; Van Dijk, 2011).
Professional plans offer robust, but modest, useful advice. The plans may, as Hopkins (2001) describes, be as simple as a project agenda or as complicated as a comprehensive regional environmental strategy. The plans help stakeholders assess options relative to current practice and the available competing arguments and assessments. The plans offer provisional support for a judgment about what to do for the future. As stakeholders accept a version of the plan and intend to follow the advice, their focus shifts from deliberation toward commitment and decision. The decision maker may mention the plan as a reason for the choice, but the choice and the ensuing action does not rely upon the plan as cause but merely a guide. Changing purposes and conditions may lead stakeholders to ignore the plan, revise it, or oppose it. The plan does not shape action, but intention.
Pragmatist integration
The powerful grip of rational expectations still leads spatial planners and stakeholders to expect a linear progression in plan making from percept through concept to choice and action. The authors of each kind of imagined place do conceive purpose and context in a deliberate and reflective fashion. They possess and deploy rational conventions to structure utopian details, plot scenarios, and envision plans. But the audience (sponsors, clientele, and public stakeholders) for the advice inhabits the complex contours of expectation and routine within a specific institutional nexus. For the pragmatist, each audience creates its own utopia, scenario, and plan within the historic contours of culture and place.
How people listen and adapt advice flows through the layers of institutional habit and convention they each learned. Annette Kim (2011a) notes how our attention gets shaped by the expectations we form in relation to what others do and say. Furthermore, this happens less from deliberate discussion and more from visual impressions and emotional empathy. We imagine our own future deeply tied to social meanings about the relationships that matter to each of us. Kim (2011b) lays out the research agenda: “The challenge will be to disentangle socially contingent factors from neurological functioning and understand how they interact … Given the recent criticisms of planning theory, this research agenda should connect these social, cognitive processes to material, spatial impacts” (p. 335).
Taking this insight, we may compare each concept in relation to a different kind of social cognition pragmatically conceived. Utopia offers a heroic conception of social change. The utopian vision shows us how radically different goals that we envision adhere in the detailed image describing specific relationships and their effects for a future place. The cognitive judgment relies upon the coherent fit among the many parts within a unified order. The psychological impact might work like the insight described by Gestalt psychology—an alternating perceptual shift between the outline image of a vase to the empty space between facing human profiles. In effect, the utopian vision skips incremental developmental change encouraging a sharp break from the past—a conversion experience that builds a new way of life on a foundation of assumptions and norms rather than experience and tradition.
Utopias, scenarios, and plans each include narrative and argument organized to persuade readers and viewers to consider changing their ways in the future. All three selectively conceive complex relationships (architecture, morality, economy, politics, and society) within place-based community. The sheer multiplicity of relations convinces us that the alternate place could prove capacious enough to complete unfinished business, tie together loose threads, bind up old wounds, and otherwise banish the vulnerability of death. They each describe future changes to illustrate the consequences of specific doctrines, practices, and purposes.
A pragmatist approach enables scholars to recognize the allure of an ideal place and to imagine the favorable interactive effects, but with a mix of irony and hope, thus unwilling to project consent for future generations. Foucault’s great contribution was to show us how enlightenment optimization not only sheds light into the dark corners of ignorance but how these norms exact new forms of social compliance and order (Foucault, 1972; Hoch, 1988). Other planning theorists have adapted his insights composing a post-structural pragmatism. See, for instance, the essay by Beunen et al. (2013) analyzing how conservation discourse relies on the performance of culturally embedded conflicting narratives and not the reflection of timeless norms. The pragmatist recognizes the vitality and power of imaginatively conceiving social and physical outcomes for a future place. But these outcomes should not seek to inculcate the ideal as a doctrine, compelling consent. The images for the place need to be prepared for an audience whose inquiry will test the ideal and assess its merits for their own expectations. Utopia for the pragmatist loses any privileged authority and describes what we do when we conceive the future for a place in enough detail to assess what living there might mean for resolving some of the purposes and problems at hand. But even as we manage to build such a place, we will face new problems. The pragmatist embraces the edification that radical visions inspire, but without imposing the conceptual grip of perfection or a firm foundation. There is no substitute for practice.
Proponents of strong doctrinal norms for the future design of places disparage pragmatic conceptions of planning as unimaginative, incremental, and conservative. This flows mainly from a narrow and misleading conception of pragmatism that treats current practice as uncritically normative. Pragmatism focuses exclusively on maintaining the continuity of incremental good, an outlook that distracts the believer from considering the prospects of more expansive and critical ends (Fainstein, 2010; Hillier, 2011).
But pragmatism includes a wide and robust set of thinkers who care deeply about the sorts of long-term improvements that the planning enterprise evokes (Forester, 1999; Harper and Stein, 2006; Healey, 2009, 2010; Innes and Booher, 2010). The pragmatists like their contemporary postmodern brethren are suspicious of “just so” stories about the future that offer tame picturesque places without continuity and conflict. Unlike the Hegelian and Kantian idealists, whose students would seek social harmony through practice tied to concepts in action, pragmatists borrowed the intuitive grasp of cognitive action but naturalized it using Darwin’s insights about evolution. They broke from the classic philosophical belief that we are rational animals and emphasized that we are learning animals that invent rational tools subject to recall and revision based on practical use (Garrison, 1999). We will learn from prior mistakes and problems by resisting the longing for closure and recasting fate as an invitation to freedom (Gunder and Hillier, 2003). Pragmatists agree that we cannot tame complexity and should beware the elusive promise that we can do so. But they also believe that planners should focus on practical judgments and the actions people take to cope with complexity. That means attending to what science teaches us about expectations and causes. We can use this knowledge to improve how we comprehend and make judgments about imagined futures for specific people and places. We combine moral sensitivity, social craft, technical artistry, and political savvy as we make professional judgments about future changes and effects. The pragmatist approach can use conceptions of utopia, scenario, and plan to improve how spatial plans bridge local expectation and global fate for diverse clientele inhabiting unique institutional and geographic locales.
How might we use these concepts to guide our own judgments as spatial planners envisioning the future for civic and public institutions? First, consider research on expectations that shows how our emotions direct attention, fuel desire, and guide judgment together with cognitive efforts that deliberately frame, analyze, and value imagined options as intentions susceptible to choice and action. The complexity of practical human judgment makes clarity of purpose and intention less a matter of vision and more a matter of action (Hoch, 2006; Sandercock, 2003). Bias and desire direct attention and judgment even as purpose and goals require reflection using forethought that takes these into account (Kahneman, 2011; Rogoff, 1990). The practical details of each type of imagined future can include the irony of political agonism (Mouffe, 1999, 2007) and the allure of unconscious desire (Allmendinger and Gunder, 2005; Baum, 2010). How do utopia, scenario, and plan integrate feelings and purpose as people conceive the future for a place?
Second, consider research about the causes and patterns of modern settlement and competing claims about their epistemic grip and normative clout. The increasing multiplicity of disciplinary methods and moral goods makes it unlikely that anyone can comprehend the field, much less offer a unified synthesis (Mandelbaum, 2000). Analysts study patterns and cause within familiar disciplinary and moral turf using their ideas to conceive the forces for change, whether tied to structure, agency, or some combination. The emphasis on different kinds of cause, different frameworks for moral interpretation, and competing orientations within each offers diverse accounts of change—but no way to reconcile and choose among these. How do utopia, scenario, and plan help resolve the composition and choice of causal order and change for the future of a place?
Utopia
When spatial planners and planning scholars conceive utopias to tame the complexity of social, economic, and political life within complete places, they offer assurance and security as they stretch the bounds of human imagination and effort. The pragmatist is wary of utopias less by their power to excite the imagination, and more by their disregard for the inherent limits of human fallibility and corruptibility while overlooking the surprising resilience of human imagination and creativity. The pragmatist constructs utopias when confronted with cynical disregard for the future tied to doctrinal narrowness, unimaginative abstraction, listless indifference, or external repression. Utopian visions awaken the possibility of individual fulfillment through new forms of civic sociability within a place. Utopias reawaken the possibility for hope in the future. Fainstein (2005) makes the case for this effort using the intellectual resources of political economy, as does John Friedmann (2011) as he envisions conditions for a good city resting on four pillars: paid work, social provision, affordable housing, and healthcare. But the ideals they describe imagine audience inspiration and conversion independent of context and practical judgment.
Utopian conceptions of the future, viewed pragmatically, imagine interaction effects tied to dramatic changes in the habits of daily living. This does not require audience commitment to a singular moral system of doctrinal belief. A pragmatic tolerance for cosmopolitan diversity of social norms relies on an increasingly inclusive and shared infrastructure of democratic civility. The meaning of these contours flows not from generic rules, but from conventions tied to specific practices and habits that combine differences into a rich plurality of interactive social outcomes. The contested development of liberal social and political institutions provides a range of local contexts for place-focused plans. Utopia describes a way of life that reproduces the shared infrastructures that generate new values and foster individual meaning. Utopia in this view will be imperfect and contested even as it resolves current problems (Pinder, 2010). Utopia describes desirable details of new ways of life at the horizon we never reach, but toward which we aspire as we imagine (and even practice) recasting old habits into new.
Scenario
Scenarios capture the interplay between interpretation and complexity, offering imaginary reconciliation for the futures envisioned in stories. They help plan-making stakeholders create and compare alternative responses to the future together framing the plot. Imaginatively inhabiting the story enables the users to comprehend the emotional and cognitive meaning of the place. Each participant taps the narrative to assess the simulated impact for important purposes and strategies. Scenarios do not provide details of a purposefully detailed alternative way of life, but selective comparisons explicitly tied to assumptions and arguments about causes and consequences as currently conceived.
Pragmatically, scenarios offer narratives that stakeholders can compare to capture the meaning and significance of changes that currently haunt their imagined futures, albeit in abstract and elusive ways. These stories help people tied to a place to remember that seemingly inevitable trends or immovable structures remain susceptible to their collective purposes and actions. Each person makes choices that rely upon the inspiration and guidance of stories in memory that motivate and animate the choice. Pragmatically, scenarios draw upon this familiar narrative form of comprehension. While utopia explores the meaning of pursuing dramatically different purposes by reconciling differences within an integrated narrative, scenarios provide narratives that test differences among alternative divergent stories. Utopia edifies like a novel, while scenarios function more like proverbs.
Scenarios are not merely tools for tapping human storytelling to reduce strategic uncertainty for a place facing a complex future. For the pragmatist, complexity takes shape as a resource for survival and flourishing, as problems susceptible to action. Scenarios put flesh on the bones of arguments that forecast changes in complex behavior and ensuing interaction effects. The narratives help us frame, compose, and select better options than we would otherwise do by relying on tradition, ideals, or argument alone. Storytelling binds past and future together in ways that improve the quality of practical choice and so address complexity without sacrificing social meaning (Van Hulst, 2012).
Plan
Spatial planners make plans for people deeply constrained by political demands and other changing conditions. Plans help set problems and conceive choices in ways diverse stakeholders can comprehend and use to assess future actions and consequences. Plans inform intentions toward some future action. The cultural interpretation of plan ideas profoundly shapes the meaning of the ideas people use to make policies, rules, projects, proposals, programs, incentives, and other collective action strategies that can traverse the complicated institutional landscapes for towns, cities, and regions. Unlike social norms or laws that constrain us as we learn their meaning and so help govern a place, plans help us review and compare the meaning of different expectations for the future of a place. This imaginative reconsideration requires that people suspend attachments to familiar practices and beliefs so as to compare these against others as practical alternatives. This detachment does not distance people from the practical details of a place or the many competing moral purposes and political interests. It means that for stakeholders to plan they must experience and recognize doubts, curiosity, desires, and expectations that disrupt current habits and conventions that currently govern the place they inhabit. The confidence and commitment that assured our compliance with law and custom now shift to the plan making as stakeholders consider what options might resolve the problem for the place. The decision to choose one solution among the many considered does not flow from the planning, but from the intentions of the stakeholders who used the plan to conceive and compare choices.
Collaborative planning seeks to include stakeholders in the plan making so that the participants comprehend the meaning of optional decisions for the purposes and circumstances at hand. The deliberation among the community of stakeholders making the plan helps set or frame the problem to include differences in purpose and interpretation. For the pragmatist, the plan works if someone adopts it as a guide for judgment. The choice of an option and the ensuing action includes personal, social, institutional, and environmental influences. So if the actions achieve consequences that solve problems then the public clientele rarely mention the plan. Plans do not decide or act, people do. People take credit for good outcomes, emphasizing the virtue, integrity, and wisdom of their decision making. Good plans become psychologically invisible until the next problem. 1 Ironically, if future events turn out badly, sponsors and clients often blame the plan and spatial planners regardless of evidence for blame. It may be that the plan included error and misleading goals, but accurate and relevant plans may become scapegoats for bad leadership and poor decisions (Baum, 1999).
The pragmatist approach places expectations and knowledge along continua that invite planning stakeholders to adapt the advice they compose about an uncertain future to the circumstances and conditions that emerge. Faced with the calamity of ambitious modernist-inspired inner-city public housing high-rise projects, housing and urban development (HUD) planners in the 1990s adopted a utopian urbanism tempered with more modest ideas and expectations (Goetz, 2013; Vale, 2002). The award-winning regional plan for Chicago uses scenarios to highlight the advantages of infill mixed-use development even as ensuing project and infrastructure ideas offer only modest adjustments to current practice (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP Go to 2040 Plan, 2010). Instead of critiquing these sorts of efforts from the heights of moral perfection or optimal rationality, the pragmatist focuses on increments of successful adaptation. Harper and Stein (2006) describe how deploying a wide reflective equilibrium the pragmatist can conceive increments that coherently bind together the imagined possibility with practical opportunity. But this approach allows for a wide range of strategies. For instance, consider the tight tentative assessment of plans in the context of historical comparison (Ryan, 2011) or the expansive assessment of collaborative efforts (Innes and Booher, 2010).
Conclusion
The pragmatist does not believe we can craft a utopia, scenario, or plan for a place without already imagining and deploying the active imagination we each use to conceive and compare options for practical attention and judgment. As we anticipate and prepare for the future of a place, we combine our expectations and knowledge to conceive the imagined place. We make plans to guide deliberate comparisons about what options to choose. The plan helps us settle on the option clients intend to choose and use. I think planning practitioners, professional and otherwise, do well enough if the plans they make guide and form the intention of their collaborators and clientele, especially as utopian visions and scenarios improve the moral reach and relevance of the advice. If people and institutions take advice, but do not act upon it, stakeholders should not feel that their plan failed. Plans advise. They do not compel, but counsel. The research on planning practice can and should explore how spatial planners of every sort mobilize and adapt these concepts as Albrechts (2005), Healey (2010), and Van Hulst (2012) do as they explore how spatial planners and plans imagine futures as guides for practical judgment.
I used plan in this article to describe the advice people learn to imagine and use as they encounter problems in their daily lives: where should we meet, when do I arrive, what route do I take, how should I travel, and who will come with me? Mostly people learn to rely on habit, but reflective comparison of options provides part of the crucial architecture for practical judgments about the future. This pervasive planning fuels the varieties of plans professionals, public officials, civic activists, organizational leaders, local stakeholders, and others conceive and make as they attend to the future for a specific place. The collective purposeful efforts to deliberately and publicly prepare and consider options for the future of a place can create a utopia, scenario, or plan. But all three remain tied to the practical art of planning that people everywhere use to cope with problems and prepare better for an uncertain future.
This continuity makes sense because I decouple planning from rationality. Rationality (with all its variety of meanings) need not accompany or support planning, although it may. Planning contributes cognitive and conceptual support for the development of rationality (Hoch, 2007). Professional and other spatial planners can and do use all sorts of rational distinctions, tools, and insights as they make plans for places. As spatial planners and planning scholars turn to practical plan making, we should deploy the thin liberal virtues of prudence and tolerance to practical judgments about congestion, density, pollution, and the homeless to frame the complex goals and causal interplay that shape the situations where sponsors and public clientele seek advice. Planning practitioners offer advice about a specific situation and the problems it poses for practical judgment and action. The spatial planner helps people compare and consider options. The proposals should be specific and tied to context. The audience should be recognized and engaged. This may include compelling accounts of future outcomes that participants desire, embedded as stories susceptible to challenge and amendment. But the conceptual and imaginative reach of these arguments and tales need not provide foundation for belief. That belief remains open to practical experimentation achieving together the purposes we intend to pursue (Bertolini 2009). The flourishing that John Friedmann embraces in his conception of the good society provides an apt description of the sort of effects that the authors of utopias, scenarios, and plans hope their advice will inspire, cultural and institutional evolution that builds upon the natural kind that produced Homo sapiens. The pragmatist concentrates on the journey more than the destination because the destination will change as we learn how to flourish. But of course we may not.