Policy Research for Local Government

Abstract

This paper was presented at the OR Society’s annual conference at the University of Exeter in September 1967. In it, John Friend put forward for the first time the foundations of the broad decision-centred approach to planning that later became known as the Strategic Choice Approach. This approach was later to be applied experimentally in association with six teams of local government planners in the LOGIMP experiment of 1970, after which it became widely applied in urban and regional planning in Britain and other countries. In the 1980’s, it became recognised within the OR community as one of the leading approaches within the family of relatively “soft” OR problem structuring methods. At the time of the Exeter conference, IOR’s pioneering project on city planning in Coventry was in the late stages of its four year life. After a number of false trails had been pursued, more confident conclusions were now emerging from the research. These were to be brought together in 1969 in the book Local Government and Strategic Choice [Friend and Jessop, 2nd edition reprinted Routledge 2012]. In the Exeter paper, the three categories of uncertainty which became central to the Strategic Choice Approach were expressed as three types of assumptions in planning, while the complementary concepts about mapping of interlinked decision areas and about incremental progress in decision making were also tentatively introduced as elements in the emergent conceptual framework.