If I look back over 40 years of these editorials, what is striking is how new ideas about cities and their planning have emerged without premonition, ideas that at the time they were articulated had not even appeared on the horizon. When the journal was founded in 1974, the editor Lionel March and his colleagues which included myself, believed in the inherent predictability of the science that we were forging. We felt that the models and methods we were developing would enable us to make predictions about complex systems with some degree of certainty, so that we could use these forecasts to figure out how we might produce plans for ‘better cities’. We were not particularly naïve in these sentiments because design was central to the role of models in planning and as many of us were trained as architects, we were conscious of our role in ‘inventing the future’ rather than just predicting it (Batty, 2018). Predictions and predictability were thus constructs that helped us to invent a better future, by at least steering the future away from what we might foresee as undesirable. Good predictions were judged to be essential.

中文翻译：

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不可预测性

如果我回顾这些社论的40多年，那么令人震惊的是，关于城市及其规划的新想法是如何在没有事先征兆的情况下出现的，当时表达出来的想法甚至还没有出现。当该杂志于1974年成立时，编辑莱昂内尔·马奇（Lionel March）和包括我在内的同事们相信我们正在锻造的科学固有的可预测性。我们认为，我们正在开发的模型和方法将使我们能够一定程度地对复杂系统进行预测，以便我们可以使用这些预测来弄清楚如何为“更好的城市”制定计划。我们对这些想法并不特别幼稚，因为设计对于模型在规划中的作用至关重要，而且我们当中许多人都接受过建筑师的培训，我们意识到我们在``创造未来''中的作用，而不仅仅是预测（Batty，2018）。因此，可预测性和可预测性可以帮助我们发明更好的未来，至少可以避免使未来远离我们可能认为不理想的事物。良好的预测被认为是至关重要的。