A renewed search for definition in the planning field is underway today. Aaron Wildavsky's (1973) challenge, "If planning is everything, maybe it's nothing," has echoed ever louder over the years. Planning's broad relevance and its interdisciplinary inclusiveness have served as both a strength and a vulnerability. Ever adaptable, the planning field has continued to evolve in many directions, and in academia it provides a big tent that shelters scholars trained in many more disciplines than planning alone.
One emphasis that has been identified as central to the intellectual and professional identity or mission of planning is "foresight" (Markusen 1998), "a focus on the future and pathways of change over time" (ACSP 1997, 223), or "persuasive storytelling about the future" (Throgmorton 1992). Recent writers have proclaimed the future orientation of planning as unique to the field's identity and have called for renewed focus and development of future-oriented skills.
The reasons for planning's special relationship to the future are fundamental. Evident to many is that the very purpose of a plan or the action of planning is to prepare for future activity. Planners seek not to merely predict but to create better futures. The very substance of urban planning is founded in time, because the process of urban development unfolds over decades. No matter how present-focused may be current debates and decision-making, the actual construction of individual buildings and public works takes place over years and even decades or more. Thus a concept that was approved in the present can only take shape and wield its intended physical or economic effects in the future. In turn, once built, these projects will live on for decades more into the future. In fact, urban planning has been singled out by futurists as a special case where a future orientation is most required: "It is safe to say that nowhere in the society are people's futures mortgaged so far ahead as when the municipalities plan housing projects, earmark uses of land and build highways" (passage from a report by the Swedish Secretariat for Future Studies, quoted in May 1996, 35). For all these reasons, decision-making in planning cannot avoid addressiug the future. Indeed, the future may be our major raison d'etre.
