Distinguishing ‘planning’ from the ‘plan’. Institutional and professional implications of taking urban complexity seriously

In the twentieth century, “planning” as a (public) activity and the “plan” as an instrument came to coincide. According to this perspective, planners are professionals specialised primarily in conceiving and designing plans. This article suggests that we should reject the overlap between planning and plan, recognising the latter as just one of the tools that planners can use – and for very specific purposes. The article starts by distinguishing between two different tasks of local administrations: the “infrastructural” task, and the “regulatory” one. Subsequently, it emphasises how the pre-twentieth-century idea of the plan was in the twentieth century inappropriately extended from infrastructural activities to regulatory ones as well. The article proceeds by suggesting how to remedy this situation: that is, demarcating more sharply between two different kinds of planning intervention – infrastructural and regulatory – and employing plans prevalently in the former case while utilising different instruments for the latter.