A forecast’s jubilee
12 May 2021
Alan Wilson
The Alan Turing Institute
“A bit beyond a jubilee: in 1969 I published a paper in Urban Studies titled ‘Forecasting planning’. In some ways, it wasn’t much of a forecast – I took 1980 as my time horizon. However, it is interesting to read it again more than 50 years later. I argued at the time that what I forecast for 1980 was possible ‘now’……”
A bit beyond a jubilee: in 1969 I published a paper in Urban Studies titled ‘Forecasting planning’. In some ways, it wasn’t much of a forecast – I took 1980 as my time horizon. However, it is interesting to read it again more than 50 years later. I argued at the time that what I forecast for 1980 was possible ‘now’. I would now argue that what I was arguing for has been only very partially achieved and there is much still to play for. In discussing the future of planning now in my own work, I am using much the same set of concepts that I was using then. I think I was lucky in establishing a personal intellectual tool kit that has stood the test of time and I acknowledge the key influencers who figure in the bibliography of the 1969 paper.
My argument was based on the policy-design-analysis (PDA) framework that I learned from Britton Harris. I was also influenced by economics more than I tend to be now: planning as a response to market failures, with markets allocating resources efficiently in a Pareto-optimal way – but noting that there are many ways of achieving these outcomes and these take no account of distributional consequences. Indeed, perhaps the biggest challenge in the policy development role of planning is to confront this, and this makes it clear that planning has a political core.
Planning and planners need capabilities that cover each of the fields of PDA. Britton Harris used to say that these represent different kinds of thinking and you very rarely found all three in the room together when plans are being discussed. Analytic capability has significantly advanced through research but has not percolated widely into practice; design is sometimes imaginative but is usually inadequately evaluated through analysis; policy is perhaps more in the hands of politicians with less professional input and support than there might be. This is to oversimplify of course. I argued that the analytics should be systems-focused and that this demands interdisciplinary perspectives. Indeed, planning is inherently interdisciplinary and this is a welcome, if not ways explicit, feature of planning education.
My picture of a planning team in 1980 saw them as working for a metropolitan authority, with computing power supplied by a national grid, along with national provision of software. The authority would set targets on three time scales: short, middle and long. Planning alternatives would be systematically explored and evaluated. The complexities of multiple interests in a variety of organisations was recognised coupled with a need for effective public participation. I invoked Ashby’s law of requisite variety here on the challenges of handling complexity.
What could have been achieved in 1969 or 1980 largely remains a target. Decades later, we do have metropolitan authorities and a national computing grid in the form of the ‘cloud’ – but little else of the list that was forecast and necessary. A lot of catching up is still to be done. What is now new? We have a much better understanding of analytics, especially urban dynamics, and we would certainly focus on the exploration of future scenarios rather than longer-term forecasting – I was far too optimistic (and wrong) about that. We do have much better analytic capability, the beginnings of systematic design to facilitate the exploration of alternative futures, but we have a context that is more politicised, making professional engagement more difficult.
This broad analysis has implications for planning practice, for education and for research and there are opportunities to lead and develop on all three fronts.
I argued in the 1969 paper that we could apply the PDA framework to ‘planning’ itself. This would be a starting point. What could be done? What are the priorities for planning and planners? While inevitably, there will be specialisms within planning, as with all professions, there is a need to embrace the broad range of urban challenges, to have them well articulated and widely understood, to be able to invent and advocate plans and strategies. The challenges are huge and there is a personal marker in another jubilee: I gave my inaugural lecture as a Professor of Geography in Leeds in 1971 (published in 1972) and I argued there that there were serious and developing problems of disadvantage in urban populations – and that if we couldn’t make some rapid progress, the situation would become worse. In some ways, it has become worse. This kind of challenge is more than a planning problem of course, but planners can contribute. The future context will be multi-faceted, multidisciplinary and politically complex, and planners should have the knowledge base, and the creativity, to play leading roles in this environment.
References:
Wilson, A. G. (1969) Forecasting planning, Urban Studies, 6, pp. 347-367