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Forgetting to Plan
Howell S. Baum
Journal of Planning Education and Research 1999; 19; 2
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X9901900101
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Forgetting to Plan
Howell S. Baum
Those who
cannot
George Santayana,
ABSTRACT
Conventionally, planning for the future depends on collecting information and analyzing
it rationally in order to control contingency.
In reality, contingency persists, and communities react in ways that defeat planning. Seeing
problems and uncertainty, communities often
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 satisfactions, and its centrality to their identity, and
they want to maintain it against change.
Hence planning depends on forgetting: forgetting a static image of the past in order to remember the past as a time of contingency and
to see the past linked in time to the present
and the future.
The patient is cured in psychoanalysis when, among other things, he continplan for the future knowing he is unable to do so.
Adam Phillips, On Flirtation
ues to
retreat to a
s TWO VIGNETTES
nate
their
sires,
our
Moreover, we often want what we know, what we remember familiarly, rather than anything strange, much less any-
had been.
In the Jewish community across town, activists in the
central organization initiated strategic planning to set directions for the organization and, by extension, the community. Though the community and the organization were
economically quite secure, leaders openly worried about declines in ethnic identity similar to those in the working-class
community. As assimilation had become possible, Jews participated more in the larger society. Philanthropists gave to
secular causes as well as, or instead of, to the Jewish community organization and its agencies. Middle-class people affiliated less with Jewish religious or ethnic institutions. Many
married non-Jews and did not raise their children as Jews.
Community leaders were concerned about the continuity of
their community.
Yet planning participants, while lamenting these trends,
aimed to restore an idealized past. They recalled a time
when community was strong, religion mattered, ethnicity
was forceful, and a measure of anti-Semitism reinforced
Jews tendencies to identify unconditionally with one another. They did not ask what were the attractions of the
world outside their community, why religion mattered less,
or why Jews were not marrying Jews or raising their children
as part of the community. Instead, they simply advocated
community &dquo;continuity&dquo;-continuity of the distant past, as
if the recent past had not occurred-and they urged people
to resume patterns of worship and socialization associated
with earlier generations. They did not consider how developments suggested new models for the community or their
organization, and they did not develop realistic strategies for
responding to the trends that concerned them.
In both instances, community planning participants reacted to threats to their community by remembering and
trying to restore a version of the past. Neither organization
developed a realistic image of a future that would grow out
of the past while diverging from it. As a result, their plans
diluted strategizing with wishful thinking.
0 PLANNING
Planning is a mental activity that aims to affect the external world. Directed toward the future, planning concerns
imaginary events, that, however much one might desire
them, have never taken place, have uncertain precedent, and
might never occur. Given the unpredictability of human
events, people find it reassuring to imagine that the future
repeats the remembered past. Thus, the mental activity essential to planning is always in jeopardy.
Uncertainty reigns in human affairs: We can calculate
reassuringly plausible odds of events, but we cannot elimi-
contingency. At the same time, some of our dedeepest ones, remain hidden from us, from our
conscious selves: We do not always know what we want.
CONTINGENCY
move
one
hand, tradition and economic necessity make it virtually certain that legislatures will continue to require payment of taxes.
On the other hand, firms financial security depends on their
making complicated forecasts and decisions about goals, strategies, resources, demands, and constraints.
In fact, most of the areas of life that matter are like the
latter. Human activity is subject to various influences, imperfectly understood, and difficult to control. Crucially,
Marris
1996).
Contingency presents us with a paradox. We cannot escape it, but we must significantly reduce our experience of it
to give ourselves the confidence that we can act intentionally. Yet we must not so reduce apparent contingency as to
persuade ourselves that little is left within our grasp-that
things are rigged. At its realistic best, planning is an inventive art, concerned with diminishing the domain or at least
the consequences of uncertainty while holding open possibilities for acting. Planning is jeopardized by efforts to see
everything as certain, even-perhaps particularly-certainly
good.22
Sometimes planning is a defense against the discovery of
contingency-irreducible uncertainty, accident-and the
sense of impotence it can engender. In this context, the alliance between planning and the social sciences is not accidental. The conventional interpretation of this link focuses on the
establishment of academic planning programs (Hoch 1994;
Krueckeberg 1984; Sch6n 1983). As planners sought professional status, they promoted university training as a substitute
for apprenticeship. Academic culture, in turn, shaped what
future planners were taught and who taught them. Research
universities held the most prestige among institutions of higher
education, and doctorate faculty were the norm. Doctoral
planning programs were established to prepare faculty to teach
planning students. These programs mimicked the dominant
model of the social sciences, which aspired to the precision and
....
status
uncertain whether we have the neurological capacity to remember all we have experienced, but we know we have forgotten a great deal. What, for example, did we do during the
365 days of our third year of life? We forget for many reasons. To begin with, our first experiences precede words.
Infants endure an eternity before they learn a language others can understand. But then the words are
inadequate to
record the experiences that went before them, in a time
when experience ineffably combined touch, taste, smell,
hearing, and sight. Later in life we rediscover the inadequacy
of language when we have difficulty portraying the beauty of
a scene, conveying our feelings, or remembering our dreams.
Dreams epitomize problems with language. Dreams are
metaphorical, combining images, sounds, and sensations.
Words in dreams are notoriously unreliable, puns or onomatopoeia, never what they seem. This is the wordless language we originally engaged in as infants and, crucially, the
way we understand the world in the moments before we
find words with which to think, talk, and act. Unconscious
thinking deeply shapes what we see as conscious calculation.
Thus the store of facts about the past accessible to us is
inevitably reduced in several ways beyond any neurological
limitations. Reliance on language forces us to forget experiences that resist words. On top of this, just as professional
historians, we choose to forget experiences that are inconsistent with how we want to think of ourselves-in particular,
experiences that would embarrass us, cause us to feel guilty,
lead us to fear punishment, or otherwise arouse anxiety. In
various ways we repress what we once knew about ourselves,
pushing certain facts from awareness. With respect to our
conscious thinking, we have forgotten things. However, as
with experiences that exceed the potentials of language, we
remember them unconsciously, in ways we do not recognize, and we interpret, evaluate, and act on the world in
their terms.
We forget in other, more subtle ways. We may keep an incident in mind but re-write its script, altering the plot and the
characters moral valences. We may substitute an innocuous or
benign image for what was upending.~ We may condense several episodes into one, perhaps covering over a dangerous situation with one in which we were safe or even heroic, remembering our past in a way that reassures us about our potential
to do and be good. Thus, in many ways we diminish our accessible memory by what we choose to forget.
Spence (1982), writing of psychoanalytic patients efforts
to recall and learn from their experiences, echoes Carr in
distinguishing historical truth from narrative truth. We may
aim for the former, an inclusive veridical account, but we
construct only the latter, a story that makes sense of available facts and satisfies the pragmatic test of contributing to
effective action. With effort, we may remember more of our
past. But remembering is not a matter of journeying mentally to a vault where all the data of our lives are deposited,
ready to be checked out. Rather, it is a way of recategorizing
some
rate accounts
an
official
contest
Kennedy 1982; Frost et al. 1985; Schein 1992). The Challenger disaster dramatically shows what happens when
members of an organization prefer an idealized memory of
perfection to an accurate one of increasing mistakes
(Schwartz 1990). Societies create monuments to benign
images of the past in efforts to put disruptive versions to
rest (Sturken 1997). In many ways, groups choose to remember their past so as to make sense of current conditions
or resolve contemporary conflicts (Halbwachs 1992).
These observations do not assume that collectivities
think with a single mind. Not everyone in an organization
or community, for example, thinks the same, nor is every
member wholly in the group, without autonomy or outside
loyalties. Moreover, formally and informally, collectivities
divide up labor. Differences and conflicts of both perception and interest abound. Still, there are moments when
many, if not all, members identify with one another and act
on common assumptions, when even those who disagree
find it politically, culturally, or psychologically difficult to
think or act differently.
Sometimes people deliberately deceive others about the
past, but these examples suggest that most inaccuracies follow good-faith efforts to remember things in ways that fit
contemporary desires and anxieties. Still, the result is the
same: Memory is an imperfect instrument for managing
contingency. The obvious flaw is that events and actors
change. Yet a more subtle disability derives from a way that
people use memory to cope with contingency. They choose
to remember things in ways that could not have been otherwise. Conscious memory contains a world without accidents : satisfaction or frustration, success or failure, events
have sure causes of someones making. Seeing the past as
determinate serves the purpose of reassuring that the future,
too, can be under control.
what
stuck
Psychologically,
trauma
is
an
The
trauma
tone
lationships.
Yet it is
not
tic,&dquo; for there are moments when the past seems real enough
those who hold fast to it. People will decide to remember
things differently for the same reasons they remembered
them originally: Pragmatically, memories make sense of everyday experiences and actions. Hence, the strongest motive
for forgetting certain memories and recollecting others is
that the apparent reality described by prevailing memories
conflicts with present realities. Change depends on seeing
costs in adhering to particular memories. For example, basking in warm thoughts of a communitys golden age may
hinder planning for improving housing stock and schools.
to
maintaining familiar ways of thinking, social relationships, places, and practices that have given them meaningful
identities. When their identity is injured, when they feel they
have lost control over the relevant world, they seek anchors in
the past and hold fast against the depredations of change.
People experience change-even when it improves their
lives, even when they choose or enact it-as loss. Without
consciously thinking, we react with dual impulses of seeking
to return to a time when we were secure and trying to forget
altogether what has gone. Each is an effort to stop time, to
separate the past from the present. Giving up the past can
seem to mean disavowing oneself, committing existential
tive,
there is
are indistinsubstitute
and
wishful
guishable. They
nostalgia
thinking
for analysis and strategic action.
For example, public housing residents who live in desolate, crime-ridden neighborhoods may resist relocation or
demolition and replacement of their projects, even when
they can move into sounder, more attractive housing. They
have worked out relationships and routines with people and
places, and they are wary of new situations over which they
expect little control (Vale 1997; Varady and Walker 1997).
Many residents of the working-class neighborhoods described in the first vignette prefer remembering vigorous
early immigrant communities to grappling with economic
and racial changes. Some talk of establishing a museum of
ethnic history. Jewish leaders in the
vignette invoke
of
that
and
call
for
&dquo;Jewish conticommunitys
images
past
while
to
reasons
attention
nuity&dquo;
giving superficial
why
many find other identities more attractive. They resist
changing their institutions to accommodate social and cultural trends that draw members away.
And yet individuals and group do
They adapt to
new conditions, they give up old ties, and they overcome
injury. They recognize costs to past ways of thinking, and
they see gains in new choices. They succeed in mourning
the loss of past attachments, reconciling them to present
realities. Marris (1975) describes widows grieving as a prono
second
change.
totypical process:
[G]rief works itself out through a process of reformulation, rather than substitution.
Confidence in the original commitment is restored by extracting its essential meaning and
grafting it upon the present. This process involves repeated reassurances of the strength and
inviolability of the original commitment, as
much as a search for the terms on which reattachment would still make life worth living. Until this ambivalent testing of past and future has
retrieved the thread of continuity, it is itself the
only deeply meaningful activity in which the bereaved can be engaged (98).
Successful
One is
Gennep
pre-ordained.
Everyday efforts to change in modern society are less defined. Participation is voluntary. People calculate the costs
and benefits of unfreezing old memories, and they weight
the past much more heavily than the present. If they contemplate change, they assess the likely process. Will it be
painful? Will it harm them irreparably? Will they come out
safely? Will life be better as a result? Individuals and collectivities vary in both their anticipations and their ability and
willingness to tolerate anxiety associated with change (Diamond 1993; Stein 1994). In practice, boundaries between the
tasks of changing are often fuzzy, and participants may move
back and forth among them. They may declare their intentions to change but resist unfreezing an old position until,
somehow, they experience moving safely to a new one. Moving in one respect may motivate unfreezing in another. Finally,
in contrast with many formal rituals, the length, course, and
outcome of change activities are difficult to predict.
Still, the conditions that enable individuals and collectivito change are the same that make the transitional stage
of formal rituals effective. People need a space that is free of
ties
10
Thus
alistically toward the future in the present depends on remembering and forgetting. We may recall new details about
the past, and they may overshadow others we gradually lose
track of. But, centrally, we must forget memories as present
events and leave them to be rediscovered in the past tense.
We must forget that people, places, and things are as they
were. We must remember that things have changed, that
changes have brought injuries and losses. We must forget
that we will somehow perish if we lose certain things. We
must remember that we cared so deeply about them that we
wished to keep them with us forever.
There is an old joke, where someone tells another, &dquo;Dont
think about elephants.&dquo; Remembering and forgetting are
linked in this paradoxical way. Their relationship is not direct, linear, unidirectional, or fully conscious. There are no
even exchanges where, for example, community members
agree to forget something in order to remember something
else. Forgetting and remembering are intricately linked moments in a high-stakes struggle over how to interpret the
past and the present. It is possible to prepare the stage for
their play, but it is difficult to script the action or be sure of
the denouement.
0 PLANNING TO FORGET TO PLAN
ing future will not take the place of the idealized past.
Mourning, playing, and working through are processes by
which individuals and collectivities try to give up the past
they love and struggle with a disquieting present to create a
future in which they might realistically hope. They suggest
11
Telling a Story
Planning is an effort to tell a story about the future. Ofthe text is explicit and its drafting deliberate, as with a
plan (Mandelbaum 1990, 1991). As an account of the future, a plan can be neither true nor false, though it may be
confirmed by subsequent events. As a declaration of intentions, it may be written in good faith, and it may be realized
later on; this is the ambition of planning. In these respects,
plans are pragmatic documents (see Krieger 1981).
Written plans normally codify conversations about the
ten
Constructing a narrative in this way can enable a community to experience the past vitally for the first time. Members can take it as an object for reflection, find themselves in
it, imagine alternative positions for themselves, and see various ways of remembering themselves. In gaining freedom in
the past-specifically, in becoming able to reject certain narratives-they come into freedom in the future. Members
can contribute consciously to a community ideal, and they
can imagine ways to realize it.
Most written plans are too distilled to be powerful in
these ways. They offer readers a belief without engaging
Planners,
12
need to mourn for what they decide to give up. They must
talk about what they care about in the past, how they loved
it, how it made their lives meaningful, how it made them
feel special, and how they dont want to give it up. And they
must talk about how they want to give it up, how they will
miss it, how they will feel guilty about surrendering it, how
they will be angry at themselves for letting go of something
they care deeply about, and yet how they must let go, because it is really gone, because holding on holds them back,
because it is an illusion, and for any other reasons. And they
must talk, once more, about how they will remember what
they are giving up, in a different way.
Thus planning must let people argue with themselves and
be inconsistent. Planners who insist that participants be rational or that discussions follow a logical order elicit only
superficial participation. Told to be rational, people assume
they have been told not to be themselves. They may feel
relieved: Planning will not require them to reveal or risk
what matters. They may let planners believe they have participated, but they will not have planned.
Conflict arises when people disagree with one another
about what things are or who should get what. Conflict also
arises when people disagree with themselves, when they are
of two (or more) minds about something. Marris (1975)
notes, for example, that when community members are ambivalent about changing, unconsciously they may form opposing groups and do battle. The conflict may turn on substantive issues, perhaps of considerable importance, but the
sides tacitly represent different stances toward change. One
argues for leaping into the future, whereas another insists on
holding onto the past. Each represents part of a community
mind with respect to remembering and forgetting. If they
can resolve their differences, one effect will be to give up the
past sufficiently to approach the future. Planners who try to
suppress conflict or to resolve it on the basis only of substantive issues can sabotage the work of grieving. Planners
should not only expect conflict, but encourage it when it is
part of mourning. Negotiations that produce agreements
can help groups work through common losses of past rela-
tionships.l2
When communities do decide to change, they want to
change only a little. Cognitively, they can take in only so
much of the world at once (Miller 1975). Practically, they
can affect only a small
part of what they see. Centrally,
people can tolerate only a little change without feeling lost.
Emotionally, human beings are incrementalists. Yet comprehensiveness is a tenet of planners faith: If something should
change, everything connected to it should change, at once.
Sometimes planners thinking is aesthetic: The parts of a
picture should fit together. Other times, their reasoning is
empirical: The parts of a society work together. However,
what planners often leave out is the humans in the buildings, places, or institutions. They must change for land use
(that is, how they use land) to change. Many planners think
about
13
Bion, W. R. 1961. Experiences in Groups. New York: Basic Books.
Black, Alan. 1990. The Chicago Area Transportation Study: A case study
of rational planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8. "Future search
9. Carr (1961) writes, "To enable man to understand the society of the past
and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual
function of history" (69). Mandelbaum (1977, 1980, 1984, 1991) has
articulated a view of the pragmatic uses of history in planning.
10. This discussion draws on Winnicotts (1953, 1967) concept of the
transitional object. The prototype is the infants blanket, which
symbolizes the relationship with the mother. Manipulating the
blanket—holding it, putting it aside, picking it up again—allows a
child to contemplate alternative relationships with the mother. The
transitional object creates an ontologically ambiguous space that allows
experimentation with new positions without giving up old ones. A
planning process can provide a similar space for illusions.
11. John Forester notes that the purpose of ground rules in mediated
negotiation and consensus building is to create such transitional space.
12. In planning by The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of
Baltimore, community groups disagreed about the authority of
different memories and the legitimacy of alternative futures. Planners
tried to suppress conflict in order to plan harmoniously. Instead, the
conflicts, undiscussed and unaddressed, persisted, and the organization
could not plan realistically (Baum 1997a). Forester (1994) shows the
importance of explicitly addressing traumas and grievances.
0
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