What Tense Is a Plan

Plans have a complicated relationship to time and thus to verb tense. They are forward looking but have current goals for future circumstances. Such goals typically reflect the contemporary situation when the plan was created, as well as reacting to the history of the place. Plans speak about the future, what people are planning for, but are creatures of the time when they were written. They may also be seen as part of the current regulatory landscape even if they are not themselves laws; rather, they are typically implemented separately by regulations, programs, and policies. This generates a mixture of future orientation, past writing, and current relevance. More than just a copyediting issue, this relationship between plans and time raises deeper issues.

Over the past 4 years as JAPA editor, I have read many papers about plans. These have included urban, regional, neighborhood, sector, sustainability, adaptation, mitigation, comprehensive, transportation, housing, scenario, and several other kinds of plans. In JAPA, such plans have often been the subjects of analysis. Authors have unpacked what they have said about specific topics, examining plan text and illustrations to understand debates when they were written and what that means now. Many plans have provided data for evaluations and assessments on topics from sustainability to equity and the arts. Others have been part of the contexts for case studies.

This raises the practical question for a journal editor: What tense is a plan? When referring to a plan in an article, is it like a law (current), or a vision (future), or is it a representation of its time (past)? Though tense is to some extent a matter of grammar, it is also a matter of style. For example, JAPA uses American Psychological Association (APA) style, seventh edition. When referring to published studies, APA style favors past tense (Forsyth proposed) or present perfect (others have shown; APA, 2022). Other approaches to style might use more present tense, adding a layer of confusion.

Beyond these issues of writing, the tense of the plan also matters in practice in the sense of whether a past plan is still relevant for the future. I remember one of my early research projects talking to local activists fighting a planned urban expansion, which had been slated for some decades (Forsyth, 1997). These activists were quite critical of accepting the plans of the past in the current era. At the same time, they wanted long-term plans to lock in their own vision for the future. These tensions between past, present, and future are common in planning. They are at least in part debates about whether a plan’s time is past or still current and about what that means for the future.

Where does that leave the plan in journals such as JAPA? I have come to see that the answer depends on the circumstance. Many articles in JAPA have used plans as data to assess how planning ideas have changed over a period of years. Authors have analyzed plans as products of their time, and that time is past. At other times, researchers have examined plans as part of the current landscape of regulations, which is part of the present context. Still other research could look at plans as future visions. Sometimes the status is not clear. An author may discuss a 2010 plan, analyzed in 2018, but is it still current when the author submits the article in 2023? Should authors assume so?

Planning scholarship embraces this complexity of plans’ past, future, and current relevance. I hope this editorial helps authors and readers engage plans and their times more critically.

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Asha Weinstein Agrawal for comments on this editorial and to Joan Fitzgerald for getting me interested in the topic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann Forsyth

ANN FORSYTH ([email protected]) is the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University.