Cities are good at making plans. What they often avoid is making the strategic choices that create the opportunities those plans are meant to shape. Much of what is described as strategic urban planning is, in practice, good planning applied after the harder choices have already been deferred.

The problem begins with how strategy itself is understood. Roger Martin, one of the leading thinkers on business strategy, defines it as “an integrated set of choices that positions an organisation to win”. Through this lens, strategy is not a vision, a set of principles or a plan. It is a pattern of interrelated decisions in which saying yes to one path means saying no to another.

Martin’s test is blunt: a real strategic choice is one that a reasonable person could disagree with. If no one would argue against it, then no real choice has been made.

That test matters because cities use the language of strategy constantly. Yet much of what passes for urban strategy contains no contestable choice at all. It expresses aspiration, alignment and direction, but avoids the one thing that gives strategy its force: selection under constraint.

That matters because the world cities now face is becoming harder, not easier, to navigate. In continuing to avoid real strategic choices, cities weaken their capacity to shape their own future and diminish the opportunities they can create.  

Why definitions matter

In Where city futures are locked in, we argued that early decisions in city-shaping projects are poorly governed, with no one clearly accountable for defending what a project was committed to deliver. The roots of that problem lie deeper than process.

They begin with a simpler question: are cities actually doing strategy at all?

Planning and strategy serve different purposes. Planning is inherently accommodative. It coordinates growth, balances interests, allocates land, integrates infrastructure and translates political compromise into spatial form. Its legitimacy rests on inclusion and procedural fairness. It manages complexity and reconciles competing claims within existing constraints.

Strategy, by contrast, is selective. It defines direction by prioritising some paths over others. It accepts that not every objective can be pursued equally, and that trade-offs are unavoidable. Its legitimacy rests on coherence, concentration and commitment over time.

Planning can, at times, contain strategic choices. But its dominant institutional logic is accommodative. When planning and strategy are collapsed into the phrase “strategic urban planning”, that logic usually prevails. Plans become comprehensive, balanced and difficult to oppose. But the very qualities that make them inclusive also make them resistant to choice.  

What cities actually produce

Apply Martin’s test to a typical strategic urban plan and the result is uncomfortable. Most begin with a broad vision: a city for everyone, sustainable and resilient, innovative and inclusive. Beneath that sit principles and priorities broad enough to accommodate every reasonable interest.

This is often good planning. It can help coordinate growth, manage competing claims and articulate shared aspirations. But it is not necessarily strategy.

Plans of this kind are usually designed to be agreed with. That is precisely their strength, and also their limitation. The more successfully they accommodate competing interests, the less likely they are to force a genuine choice.

If a plan does not position a city to build advantage in something specific, resolve tensions between competing values, clearly prioritise some paths over others, or establish commitments that later decisions must defend, it is not strategy. It is planning expressed in strategic language.  

When accommodation is not enough

Accommodative planning is valuable. Managing growth, sequencing infrastructure and zoning land for different uses are necessary functions in any city. Done well, they create stability, predictability and legitimacy.

Accommodation works when the future resembles the recent past. It works when the task is to absorb change rather than redirect it. But when growth, disruption or constraint demands a meaningfully different direction, accommodation becomes insufficient. At that point, a city must do more than manage what is coming. It must choose what it wants to become.

Strategy becomes indispensable when a city needs to alter its trajectory rather than simply manage within it. That requires real choices of the kind Martin’s test demands: coherent, consequential and contestable.

Melbourne’s own history illustrates the distinction. The city has a long tradition of metropolitan planning, much of it competent and durable. But Postcode 3000 stands apart because it was more than accommodation. At a moment when central Melbourne had lost vitality, it made specific choices about what the city centre should become. One was to bring residents back into the city centre by converting underused commercial buildings into housing. Another was to support the fine-grained street and laneway life that would make a residential downtown viable, distinctive and alive. These were not generic commitments to revitalisation. They were concrete bets about how the centre would change, helping to remake Melbourne’s core as a mixed, inhabited and recognisably urban place.  

Why city planning avoids choice

Urban planning has long understood that it operates in conditions of complexity. But recognising complexity is not the same as making choices within it.

One reason cities avoid strategic choice is simple: broad visions are politically safe. They can be approved without much controversy. They survive changes in government, shifts in funding and the slow churn of institutional life. They ask little that anyone might reasonably refuse.

A genuine strategic choice is riskier. “This city will make moving by public transport easier and more desirable than moving by car in the inner suburbs.” “This region will build competitive advantage in clean energy and electrification by aligning skills, infrastructure, industrial land and investment around it.” These choices create winners and losers. They invite disagreement. A reasonable person could choose the opposite. And that is why they are so often avoided.

The result is a profession that produces documents that resemble strategy while steering around the decisions strategy requires. Yet these decisions are not abstract. They are where intent becomes capital commitment, and where a place’s trajectory becomes harder to reverse.

When cities avoid strategic choice, they do not remain neutral. They allocate capital implicitly rather than deliberately. They inherit trajectories rather than author them.  

When strategy fails cities

In business, the consequences of weak strategy can be immediate and dramatic. Companies can lose relevance quickly when technological or competitive shifts overtake them. When strategy fails in firms, failure is visible. Think: Kodak and Blockbuster.

Cities rarely fail this way. They accumulate infrastructure, institutions, culture and human capital that give them extraordinary resilience. Even without strategic clarity, they usually continue.

What they lose instead is advantage.

Strategic drift seldom produces dramatic collapse. More often, it produces places that become less distinctive, less confident and less able to shape events on their own terms. A city that once influenced its trajectory becomes one that merely reacts to it.

This is why the absence of obvious decline can be misleading. The real question is not whether cities survive without strategy. Most do. The real question is whether they build durable, compounding advantage over time, and whether that advantage expands opportunity.

Some places clearly have.  

Places that chose

Singapore did so under profound constraint. A small island nation with no natural resources and deep geopolitical vulnerability, it chose not to follow the development path of larger economies. Instead, it concentrated effort on sectors where it could be globally competitive and aligned land use, infrastructure and housing to support that direction. Those choices were deliberate, interrelated and contestable. They were not inevitable.

Copenhagen offers a different illustration. Faced with economic decline and a deteriorating urban environment, it did not simply continue accommodating inherited patterns. Over time, it made sustained choices about how the city should function: reclaiming streets for pedestrians, building a coherent cycling network and treating public space as essential civic infrastructure. Those decisions required trade-offs, and they changed how the city works.

The pattern is consistent. Places build advantage when they see their constraints clearly, choose where to concentrate effort, and sustain those choices long enough for that effort to compound.  

Where strategic thinking already exists

Design practice already works according to this logic. Architects and urban designers cannot avoid trade-offs. A space cannot serve every purpose equally. Every decision privileges some outcomes over others, whether or not that is stated explicitly.

In that sense, design already contains an implicit form of strategy. It requires choices about what matters most and resolves competing demands through those choices.

But that logic often weakens as projects move into broader planning and governance systems. Specific priorities are softened into general principles. Tensions are recast as alignment. What begins as a clear set of choices becomes a set of broadly acceptable positions.

Without the language and authority to hold those choices, design intent is progressively diluted.

The challenge for cities is not to eliminate trade-offs. It is to recognise them, make them deliberately and defend the ones that matter.  

Choices worth defending

The custodianship gap reflects a deeper condition. Where plans do not require real choices, there is little to defend when pressure mounts.

Where choices are made clearly, the dynamic shifts. Intent can be held. Trade-offs can be tested against a defined direction. Decisions can be evaluated against what was committed, rather than reshaped incrementally through process.

In that context, custodianship is not an additional layer of governance. It follows from having made choices that matter.

Cities must continue to plan. But in the face of climate risk, demographic change, technological upheaval and slowing productivity, planning alone is no longer enough. Cities also need the courage and capability to make strategic choices: to face the forces gathering on the horizon, take stock of their strengths and constraints, and cut their own path into the future.

There is a paradox here. As the stakes rise, the pressures on cities mount and the future becomes less legible, the most rational thing a city can do is also the least reducible to data. Strategy still needs evidence, diagnosis and discipline. But in the end it asks something data cannot supply on its own: a choice about the future worth building.

In that sense, strategy is not only an analytic act. It is also a creative act — an expression of hope.

If cities are a bet on us — on the idea that we are better together — then strategy is one of the highest expressions of that belief: the decision, made under uncertainty, to choose a future worth pursuing and begin building towards it anyway.