Urban planning has struggled with its own identity for over sixty years. Aaron Wildavsky's 1973 question, whether planning can be coherently defined at all, remains unresolved despite successive theoretical turns. Communicative planning, collaborative planning, emotive and storytelling paradigms, each has offered a new account of what planning is for. None has resolved the uncertainty.
This report argues the search has been looking in the wrong places. Planning's identity problem is not a failure to find the right definition of its content or purpose, a better account of what planning is and what outcomes it needs to achieve. Nor is it a failure of procedural rigour. It is a failure to meaningfully link the two. It is the illusion of the control over this link that keeps the field uneasy with itself.
The argument here is, at its root, a revival of a project Faludi began in the early 1970s and that the field subsequently set aside. The idea that planning theory should be built on a rigorous account of how planners make decisions, not on successive redefinitions of planning's purpose or content. This claim is grounded in Richard Rumelt's framework for strategic judgment and in contemporary cognitive and decision science, a field that has undergone significant transformation since planning last engaged with it.
This report is part of a project that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No. 101068688. © 2026 Seal on the Beach.
