ABSTRACT
Conceiving urban plan making as practical judgment shifts theoretical attention from questions of belief to questions of meaning. How do practitioners make urban plans that combine intelligent coordination with savvy communication to anticipate and cope with urban complexity? Adopt a pragmatic approach that relies on relevance and coherence to inform the appraisals, comparisons and selections that accompany practical judgment. Plans compose the meaning and consequence of future actions. Pragmatic composition combines representation and interpretation to frame problems of urban complexity. Examples from different plans illustrate four practical orientations: protocol, precedent, policy and prototype.
