Making and breaking planning tools

This essay provides a preliminary sketch of the process of converting planning instruments into tools and then of breaking or at least reforming those tools. Lifting the lid on the (mythical) planners toolkit, I see instruments in one compartment that may (or may not) become tools; in another, tools that (tomorrow or the day after) may no longer command agreement as to their shape, performance or relevance. Read as a text, the kit is an account of countless arguments and layered symbolic adjustments. This stylized account of making and breaking is grounded in an account of the set of tools designed to represent hazards as risks and of the ways in which toolmakers are perforce drawn into the design of institutions. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.