ABSTRACT
The planning strategies were developed in response to the perceived shortcomings of rationality-based models. They acknowledge the impossibility of pure rationality in planning and decision-making, and use that fact as the point of departure for the development of models that take explicit account of our nonrational characteristics. The centralized, topdown character of incrementalism and mixed scanning ultimately undermines their potential utility, just as it undermined that of the rationality-based models. Some critics have also suggested that incrementalism discourages activities that, while closely associated with rationality, are nonetheless important to any community's planning process. Like Herbert Simon, Charles Lindblom was concerned about the divergence between the methods that planners and decision-makers claimed to use and those that they actually used. As interest groups vie with one another in the political system, therefore, they tend to view planning as simply another tool to be used in pursuit of their ends.
