ABSTRACT
One of the finest traditions from the history of city planning was to ensure that plans have a long-range dimension. Two generations ago, it was not unusual for some of the long-term planning periods of city plans to extend beyond 25 years. Typically, such plans had a utopian, idealistic and futuristic theme – e.g. Reiner 1963. An inspirational example, that brought together these themes, was Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman’s 1947 book, Communitas. The Goodmans formulated three regional-scale future-planning alternative and comparative paradigms or models, or scenarios of community life. This is the kind of planning scenario formulation that made these early planning thinkers and practitioners role models for inventing creative and pragmatic ways for community actors to better harness the potential of the unknown future.
