This article revisits Throgmorton's 1996 claim that planning can be thought of as a form of persuasive storytelling about the future. It responds to three broad lines of critique, connects the claim to contemporary scholarship about `transnational urbanism' and the `network society,' and revises the author's initial claim. This revision suggests that planners should tell future-oriented stories that help people imagine and create sustainable places. It further argues that, to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, planners' stories will have to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally-grounded common urban narratives. It recognizes that powerful actors will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories.

This paper claims that policy analysis is inherently rhetorical, that it cannot be fully understood apart from the audiences to which it is directed and the styles in which it is communicated. Defining rhetoric as persuasive discourse within and between interpretive communities, I argue that policy analysts are embedded in a complex rhetorical situation created by the interaction of three primary audiences (scientists, politicians, and lay advocates), each of which has its own normal discourse and agreed-upon conventions of persuasion, and that failure to persuade any one of these audiences will cause analysts to appear incompetent, impractical or illegitimate. To support and illustrate this claim 1 reconstruct the theoretical literature about policy analysis in rhetorical terms, then review events that occurred at Love Canal, New York, in the late 1970s. I conclude by suggesting that policy analysts need to 'actively mediate' the policy discourse between scientists, politicians, and advocates.

This paper suggests that good planning is persuasive storytelling about the future, and that planners are future-oriented storytellers who write persuasive texts that other people read (construct and interpret) in diverse and often conflicting ways. The paper explores the merits of this view by analyzing Commonwealth Edison Company's hotly-contested effort to persuade the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) to approve an innovative rate increase for three large nuclear power plants. The analysis concludes that Edison failed to persuade the ICC and others because the company's story had crucial weaknesses in plot, point of view, and character development. seeks to contribute to that rhetorical turn by arguing that good planning is persuasive storytelling about the future.2 2 To draw attention to the importance of storytelling in planning is not in itself novel. Over 10 years ago Martin Krieger (1981, X) told us that &dquo;plans are works of art and artifice and experimentation&dquo; and that &dquo;they share the literary and analytic virtues.&dquo; Advice is expressed in &dquo;reasonable and justifiable&dquo; stories, he claimed, and planners can become more effective storytellers by mastering appropriate narrative forms, suitable character development, and effective stylistic devices. In the years since, several other scholars joined Krieger in discussing the importance of storytelling in planning and analysis (e.g., Payne ). I want to build on this work. I will begin by explaining why storytelling deserves attention as an important part of planning. This explanation will draw heavily on arguments presented by Alasdair Maclntyre ), Martha Nussbaum (1990), and Walter Fisher (1989. Having suggested good reasons for attending to storytelling, I will then discuss what makes one planning story more persuasive than another. This will lead me to suggest that planning can be likened to good fiction, and that planners are future-oriented storytellers who write persuasive texts that other people read (construct and interpret) in diverse and often conflicting ways. To assess the merits of this view, I then present a detailed case study about electric power ratemaking in Illinois. Having presented the case, I then ask-much like a literary critic-what sense we can make out of it. What does it, and the notion of planning as persuasive storytelling about the future, mean for planners?

This paper examines two land developments in the cities of Freiburg (Germany) and Chula Vista (California) with the purpose of comparing their transportation and land use planning institutions, processes, and actions for the importance placed on achieving sustainability. Planning practicioners in both places are committed to concepts of sustainability, but their respective attempts to achieve sustainability differ dramatically.Freiburg is pursuing relatively high density land development in conjunction with transit service, while Chula Vista is pursuing relatively low density, auto-oriented land development patterns.

This paper proposes a rhetorical approach to planning, then applies it to the City of Chicago's effort from 1985 to 199 1 to explore alternatives to remaining dependent on a single, privately owned electric utility. Arguing that surveys, models, and forecasts act as tropes (or rhetorical devices) in planning arguments, the paper focuses on a survey of Chicago businesses and their responses to the city's exploration of new energy planning options. It examines a meeting in which the survey researcher attempted to persuade a quasi-political task force of the accuracy of his survey "results." The paper discusses how a rhetorical approach could improve the theory, pedagogy, and practice of planning.Throgmorton, an-associate professor of urban planning at the University of Iowa, has worked as a planner for a local government agency, as a planning consultant, and for a national energy research laboratory. He has written numerous articles on planning rhetoric and energy planning and is currently writing a book entitled