Forgetting to Plan

Abstract

Conventionally, planning for the future de pends on collecting information and analyzing it rationally in order to control contingency. In reality, contingency persists, and communi ties react in ways that defeat planning. Seeing problems and uncertainty, communities often retreat to a past they remember in idealized ways to find gratification they do not expect from the future. They choose nostalgia or fantasy rather than looking realistically at current conditions. Thus communities resist planning not out of ignorance, but out of knowledge. They know the past, its satisfac tions, and its centrality to their identity, and they want to maintain it against change. Hence planning depends on forgetting: forget ting a static image of the past in order to re member the past as a time of contingency and to see the past linked in time to the present and the future.