Systems Analysis in Planning: A Critique of Critiques

This paper is as much concerned with a critique of the available critiques of systems analysis as with systems analysis itself. It argues that much of the assessment of systems analysis during the past decade has been misleading in the impression that it has given to the planning profession. It argues that a preoccupation with American evidence, drawn from a relatively small sample of applications, with theory rather than with practice, with substantive rather than procedural issues, with major planning issues rather than common problems, with spatial modelling rather than with methods generally and a general failure to define systems analysis, have given a distorted interpretation of the role of systems analysis in planning.