ABSTRACT
The literature offers what is now a structured discussion of the reasons why some cities, scholars and planners decided to experiment with or carefully observe the processes of strategic planning. They are to do with some of the contingent traits of the most recent season of urban life. The first season of strategic planning, which, in Italy as in Europe, started in the middle of the 1980s, tried to construct a new "developmental decision science" as a response to the growing pressure that planning felt it was under. The capacity of strategic plans to be selective, a condition that is necessary due to the shortage of resources and the ineffectiveness of institutions, seems rather limited. One wonders if this condition is simply a legacy of planning tradition whereby in the end, instead of being selective, strategic plans merely turn out as more discerning in ordering and weighting things.
