The ancient Greek philosophers classified human pursuits into four exclusive and exhaustive categories: truth (the scientific), plenty (the political-economic), virtue or fairness (the ethical-moral), and beauty (the aesthetic). Today, there exists little evidence that contemporary people have greater ability to produce or enjoy beauty than their predecessors (Ackoff, 1975).

The planning and management fields, as well as the fields of human perception and behavior, have devoted considerable attention to studying and interrelating the first three pursuits. Aesthetic issues in planning, however, have not enjoyed the same popularity. Eventually, the idea that aesthetics is antithetic or hostile to the other pursuits has gained a widespread and almost instinctive acceptance (Ackoff, 1975).

This claim can readily be substantiated by a quick survey of the mainstream planning approaches represented in popular textbooks. The normative-rational models of planners, designed to provide logical decision processes, have ignored the issue of aesthetics altogether in favor of the first three pursuits. In consequence, the normative planning techniques and models in public-policy planning have not benefited the social scientist interested in incorporating aesthetics into decision making. Having been excluded from a rigorous modeling framework, the aesthetic dimension has been treated with the overriding objective to generate “defensible,” a posteriori evidence to define intrinsic aesthetic qualities for visual-impact assessment of environmental developments. This latter scenario has been a reaction to the planners' omission, promoting an adversarial position in support of the belief that the aesthetic pursuits of humans are indeed in direct conflict with the remaining three. In turn, social scientists have sought agreement on aesthetic preferences via public surveys in which all other relevant issues – economic, ecological, political – are excluded. As such, survey information has been of little value to planners in incorporating aesthetic issues into public decision making.