The “Illinois school” of thinking about plans

Making and using plans: development of the "Illinois School"Ideas about plans are sometimes neglected aspects of planning theory and practice.Scholars at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been thinking about plans-what plans are, how they work, and how to make and use them-since the appointment of Charles Mulford Robinson as Professor of Civic Design in 1913.We identify five aspects of a current version of this thinking and label these "The Illinois School of Thinking about Plans."The 100 years of planning education and scholarship at Illinois have also influenced, and continue to influence, other aspects of planning, but here we focus specifically on plans.Much of planning scholarship focuses on the phenomena that might be planned-such as land use, transportation, economic development-and much of the scholarship on planning processes focuses on collective action, market failure, government, regulation, and deliberative collective choice.In contrast, the Illinois School of Thinking about Plans builds on the following ideas:1. Plans themselves are an important object of research, not only cities, political processes, policies, or justifications for government regulation or investment.2. Concepts from economics, operations research, and regional science are useful in thinking about how plans work, in particular the dynamics of adjustment, uncertainty, and sequential decisions.3. Intentional shaping of the future through actions that influence it is important, not just accommodating a population or economic projection or correcting market failures.4. Plans analyzed as signals, in the sense of information economics, enable consideration of multiple actors, multiple plans, institutional organization of plan making, uncertain futures, and use of plans strategically over time, whereas considering plans only as targets to be implemented makes it difficult to recognize or consider these relationships. 5.All of this is pertinent to what land use and infrastructure planners do in practice by explaining the planning we observe and justifying the planning we do.These aspects are not independent of each other.While elaborating each in turn, we build a narrative about how these ideas developed into a distinctive school of thought about plans.1.1.