FOR a long time, planners have been searching through their history to find the roots and meanings of their activity. Planning accounts tend to be biased toward certain types of practice or theoretical hopes in an attempt to assign a domain to planning that can boast homogeneity and consistency, characteristics considered typical of a well-defined technique if not of a science. In this way, even the best planning accounts become willing reductions of the multiplicity of planning practices to the coherence of general theoretical systems. The results are sometimes exciting, but because they are either too partial or too removed from reality, they are necessarily fictitious.