Planning and the Intelligence of Institutions: Interactive Approaches to Territorial Policy-Making Between Institutional Design and Institution-Building (Urban and Regional Planning and Development)

The role of social interaction and of its institutional patterns in realizing an effective linkage between knowledge and action is a classic issue of planning theory. As such, it is also linked to shifting conceptions of the "effectiveness" of planning and of its normative aims. This study of insitution design and building attempts to address the subject from an interactive and action-oriented perspective, as an invitation to think of planning - in an attitude of critical pragmatism - not merely, or primarily, as an "institutionalized" practice, as a "function" of institutions, but as a factor of institutionalization: as a form of generative action, constitutive of forms of institutionalization of social practices and, as such, of potential resources for their experimentation. This volume is divided in to three parts, the first part is devoted to tracing the reasons for a (renewed) focus on the institutional dimension of planning, with reference to the imperatives as well as to the challenges for institutional innovation in tasks of territorial governance and the second part features a case study of an experience of planning based on practices of consensus-building in New Jersey. The third part attempts to address issues concerning the role of social interaction and of its institutional patterns of conduct in an action-oriented perspective.