Sue Schwartz was sure that Greensboro, N.C.’s Southside neighborhood had tremendous potential. She looked past the blocks of dilapidated Victorian and Craftsman homes, the prostitutes and drug dealers, and envisioned an inviting mix of restored houses and shops.

Schwartz, a city planner, started putting together the pieces of a redevelopment plan in 1988. She spent seven years building political support and seeking financing. But by the time the Southside work was ready to begin, the project had become snarled in personality conflicts and confusion about responsibilities.

“It was overwhelming,” says Schwartz, the city’s chief of neighborhood planning. “It was so complex. If it was just housing, if it was just streetscape, we would have been fine.”

Frustrated and foundering, the parties turned to a consultant to jump-start the stalled project. At a two-day retreat nearly two years into the project, she guided the parties through exercises to break tasks into manageable steps and assign leaders for each of them. Something dramatic happened as a result: The long-range project that seemed hopelessly mired began to gather momentum and cruise toward completion.

Schwartz’s vision proved to be 20/20: Southside has been praised for its blend of urban renewal, retail and historic preservation, and the American Planning Association honored the project with an award.

A Visionary Art

We tend to think of long-range planning as an unwavering route to a goal, and, certainly, the best plans do chart a course of action. But experts who study those plans and help others implement them say thinking long-range is an art that incorporates dreams as well as concrete goals, focus as well as flexibility. Plan right, and you’ll channel inspiration into reality. Neglect key aspects, and derailment and disenchantment are nearly inevitable.

Futurist Glen Hiemstra leads municipalities, companies and agencies through brainstorming exercises to help them generate innovative ideas that will steer their course for the next 25 to 50 years. He almost always faces resistance at the beginning of those sessions. Someone invariably pipes up to insist that the group quit daydreaming and instead solve today’s problems.

“It’s fine, but it doesn’t create any breakthroughs in thinking,” says Hiemstra, a former professor in Kirkland, Wash., and the founder of Futurist.com.

A more productive approach is to identify challenges that are inspiring but not impossible. A key element of a powerful vision—which is the spark for a valuable long-range plan—is that its creators know only about 20 percent of what they’ll need to accomplish it.

“You need to be inspired,” Hiemstra says. “If you know everything, all you’ve done is come up with a vision that’s too timid…. If a vision is too grand, too far from where we are, people become discouraged. But if it’s too small a stretch, people will say, ‘Who cares?’”

Everyday Achievements

Once the “stretch” feels right, Hiemstra helps his clients break the long-range plan’s first goals into smaller steps. Crossing those items off their to-do lists motivates participants to work toward the next milestones and generates momentum.

Measurable, visible successes help keep Dave Zanetell energized about his long-range project: supervising the construction of a 3.5-mile, $234 million road that will replace the overburdened span across Hoover Dam. The new four-lane road being built about 1,500 feet downstream of the dam will be a safer, more efficient route when it opens in 2008.

 “It’s literally some major achievement every day,” says Zanetell, a Federal Highway Administration employee who has been at the helm of the project since its 1999 start. He oversees about 300 engineering professionals and as many as 1,500 workers from construction companies, state and federal agencies, and environmental groups.

Zanetell credits his graduate education in construction and engineering management with preparing him for the challenges of the complex project because it stressed the importance of defining the parties’ roles and honing a strategy for tackling tasks. “It’s very, very important up front, when everyone wants to jump into the nuts and bolts, to say, ‘No, let’s develop a delivery plan for the project,’” he says.

Open to Opinions and Options

Another vital factor in successful long-range planning is input. The Hoover Dam bypass plan and timetable reflect the concerns of contractors, the public and Native American tribes in the region. Work would have progressed faster without gathering public comment on design proposals, but ownership spells support. Without what experts call “buy-in,” a long-range project can hit backlash when people feel ignored or a new politician lacks her predecessor’s commitment to the plan.

 “As good as your critical timelines and rationality are, if you can’t read your public and political leadership, you’re going nowhere,” says Jana McCann, an Austin, Texas, urban design officer who is steering several long-range projects.

She and her colleagues have amassed ample support for a plan to make over Austin’s sweltering downtown into a shady, pedestrian-friendly oasis. What they’ve had to develop was flexibility.

Sidewalks are being widened and trees are being planted in the public right-of-way to create an oasis from the 100-degree summer heat. It’s part of a plan that will transform downtown Austin by 2008 with a new city hall, hotel and live-work buildings. The streetscaping phase was moving along nicely until crews planting trees struck utility lines that didn’t appear on city diagrams.

Austin’s planners weren’t about to abandon plans that had been cooking since 1984. They made their own rule: Utility lines smaller than eight inches in diameter will be relocated to accommodate trees. When the lines are too large to move, trees will be planted in sidewalk containers.

McCann says she takes the snags in stride, noting, “There are always wild cards in any construction project, particularly in a downtown.”

Greensboro’s planners learned that lesson too. Schwartz’s “wild cards” included arson fires in abandoned homes, staffing shortages and a perplexing initial lack of interest in Southside’s restored homes, despite enticing loans and grants.

None of those spelled doom for the project, though. Leaders clung to their long-range vision, which enabled them to look past day-to-day frustrations. Now they’re feeling vindicated. Southside’s revival has been the catalyst for three new condo projects nearby, and Greensboro’s downtown is evolving into what its planners dared to envision nearly two decades ago.

That willingness to look ahead with confidence rather than fear is at the heart of the best-made plans. “The purpose of long-range planning,” Hiemstra says, “is not to figure out what the future will be like, but to figure out what you’re doing today so it all makes sense 10 years from now.”

What’s the Plan?

Want to help shape a city’s skyline or a region’s roadways? Urban/city planners lead communities, officials and architects toward the future.

What to learn: Undergrads interested in urban planning usually study the social or physical sciences, such as architecture and engineering. Most add a master’s degree in city planning, says Jeff Soule, policy director of the American Planning Association, which has about 35,000 members.

Necessary skills: You need a commitment to public service and the ability to steer diverse groups of people toward consensus. The best planners are curious and innovative thinkers who can attack planning problems analytically as well as spatially.

Job outlook: Strong. Most planners are employed by public agencies. Planners tend to change jobs regularly to gain experience, so openings and opportunities for promotion are plentiful, Soule says.

Where: About 70 percent of planners work for city, county, state or federal governments. The rest are employed in academia or in the private sector, with many at consulting firms.

Conquering the Last Frontier

Space exploration was in its infancy 35 years ago when Apollo 11’s astronauts first walked on the moon. Today, as two Explorer Rovers probe Mars, 1969’s seminal achievement is old news.

Now fast-forward 35 years. Imagine, if you can, the discoveries we’ll have made about the universe and the tools that will help us explore it. Will there be flap-wing aircraft that can fly efficiently around Mars’ atmosphere? A way to control global weather? Spacesuits that fit as snugly and comfortably as wet suits?

Those innovations may sound like they’ve been lifted from science-fiction novels, but they’re already on track to become reality, says Robert A. Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), the world’s only agency dedicated to long-range planning for space exploration. Operating under a NASA contract, the institute funds the innovations of pioneering thinkers with the hope that their wildest dreams will bear fruit in 10 to 40 years.

“We’re not looking for the technology,” says Cassanova, who holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering. “We’re looking for the big, grand ideas that could have an impact on the future.”

Since its creation six years ago, Atlanta-based NIAC has awarded grants to researchers, businesses, academics and scientists for further study of about 120 groundbreaking ideas. (See niac.usra.edu/studies for a complete list.)

Like Einstein’s theory of relativity, the brightest engineering ideas “illuminate a pathway for the development of in-depth knowledge,” Cassanova says. “We’re looking for major leaps forward.”

Despite the innovators’ brilliance, only about 10 percent of NIAC ideas ever become part of NASA’s long-range plans. And those that are accepted may take decades to be refined. Fortunately, visionary thinkers are big on delayed gratification.

“We really don’t know what anything will be like 35 years from now,” Cassanova says, “so we have to help enable the future by doing the things we’re doing.”