ABSTRACT
The end of the millennium was approaching, and I was invited to give the Nijmegen Academic Lecture in the Faculty of Policy Science, University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, a country that, as Andreas Faludi once put it, had a “soft spot in the heart for planning.” I wanted to accomplish a number of things with this talk. First, I thought it was important to remind my audience of mostly European planning scholars about the origins of Anglo-American theory that was not yet well known on the continent. Second, I wanted to spell out some of the reasons why planning theory has had such a diffi cult time to become established in a profession of practitioners, many of whom approach work pragmatically without worrying about the theoretical foundations of their practice. There are other, more serious diffi culties as well, such as how we should defi ne planning as a specifi c object for theorizing. Different defi nitions would point in very different directions.
