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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments This book had its origins in a summer I spent working at the RAND Corporation . I joined a team working on new methods for defense science and technology planning, designing a WWW-based tool for collaborative public policy decision making. The plan was to use this technology to lead military of~cials through a decision-making environment and then to model the consequences of their choices—and alternatives—in the context of several different wartime scenarios. Part of my job was to prepare a literature review of ~ndings on the historical role of information technology in collaborative decision making. The conclusions I drew were entirely unexpected. Rather than ~nding that decades of investments had produced de~nitive knowledge about how such tools improved decision-making processes, I concluded that in all but a few cases, the results of such technologies were murky. My mentors at RAND urged me to publish the ~ndings, but I declined. Perhaps I was missing something, I thought; surely, so many resources would not be devoted time and again to trying to improve on a category of innovations whose bene~ts repeatedly remained unproven? It is precisely that question—How and why are resources allocated time and again to support the adoption of technical and technological tools whose bene~ts remain unproven?—that motivated me to write this book. I focus on how several decades of American city planners and managers came to rely on innovations ~rst developed to ~ght the cold war. The RAND Corporation plays a starring role in this history, and I am indebted to Robert Lempert and James Bonomo for offering me the opportunity to see ~rsthand the inner workings of that fascinating institution. Equally essential to the start-up of this project was the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Support from the Graham Foundation is acknowledged in remarkably many of my favorite books on the history and theory of architecture and urban planning. I am honored to be able to thank the foundation here for generously sponsoring much of my research travel and all of the visual material costs of this project. Historians whose focus is the recent past occasionally have the good fortune to meet some of the men and women who have made history, and several of the participants in this historical story generously gave their time for extended conversations. Harry Finger patiently answered many of my questions during a chance encounter at a New Year’s Eve party, and in a later, more structured conversation, helped me to understand more precisely how both Democrats and Republicans saw hope for the future of America’s cities in the products of the nation’s defense and space programs. M. C. Branch invited me into his home to share his recollections and let me read his as-of-yet unpublished autobiographical musings on the history and future of planning. Leland Johnson, Laurence Lynn, and Henry Rowen each offered answers to questions I could not ~gure out based on documentary records alone and pointed me toward additional sources to incorporate into the book. Speaking with these men in person and on the telephone con~rmed what I had hoped in undertaking this project—that in many cases, efforts to transfer defense and aerospace innovations to address the nation’s urban problems were undertaken with good intentions. Interdisciplinary research thrives in a community that makes collegiality across departments a priority, and Northwestern University provided an ideal home in which to write this book. Colleagues across the campus, including Jonathan Caverley, James Ettema, Susan Herbst, Eric Klinenberg, James Schwoch, and Marc Ventresca all volunteered to read a draft version of this book, and the ~nal result re_ects their extensive comments and criticisms. John Hudson, whose career at Northwestern’s Geography Department spanned the era of defense- and space-agency sponsorship for the kinds of research described in this book, helped to compensate for decades of department records having been lost in a _ood. Northwestern University also provided extensive institutional support for this project. Colleagues in the Department of Communication Studies made all efforts to arrange my teaching schedule to facilitate productive research. At the School of Communication, Dean Barbara O’Keefe extended the honor of Ameritech Research Professor for a year, giving me the time and funding to complete the book. At the Institute for Policy Research, Fay Cook warmly welcomed me to join the institute’s interdisciplinary community of scholars as a viii Acknowledgments [3.84.7.255...