Steve the Planner said:

To the Surf Bum with the beautiful surf buggy, last week was the 100th National Planning Conference in DC. In 1909, engineers, business interests, government types, and social activists got together to develop US civilian planning processes (not soviet style central planning) that laid the foundation for modern US plan-based planning, budgeting and delivery of, to name a few, building inspection and standards, safe and sanitary housing, a coordinated system of national, state and local roads, safe municipal drinking water and sewerage systems, and a common planning framework for minor things like electricity, communications, emergency response and public health networks, etc..., etc...
Steve,

This past week I caught a PBS special about John Nolen, City Planner and his excellent work in San Diego, which I occasionally have the opportunity to enjoy and appreciate. One of these days I will need to wrangle myself an invite to one of these planning conferences....if nothing else I will be shamed into moving from MS Project to Primavera

My MBA showed my that stochastic calculus was not just for forecasting/planning hydraulic/flood engineering problems but that it also works for financial engineering problems (when applied by adults with some semblance of common sense and morality). Socialism certainly tried to give planning a bad name, but it failed. As an example the costly (in lives, hopes & dreams, and of course money) 'Great Leaps Forward' have given way to 'Chinese Capitalism' an on-going journey which is thoroughly examined in my weekly Economist.

None-the-less it can be a educational experience to examine a train wreck...why in fact did the train leave the rails and where were the rails headed towards? How would have Mahatma Gandhi's ideas about "decentralized political and economic structures rooted in India's rural villages..." benefited the population as compared to Nehru's socialist ideas or Patel's capitalist ideas? Who filled the comparable roles for Afghanistan? My book on India is a fourth edition...Amazon tells me Hardgrave and Kochanek have published a seventh edition.

I was hoping that perhaps you had a open source planning reference for Afghanistan or Iraq (each Soviet clients at one point) so that we could examine the state planning train wreck from a historical point of view and perhaps work on a compare/contrast with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Best,

Steve