An Ordinary Town, a Difficult Project

The town had already tried three plans. Each was well written. None had been read. The residents did not distrust the ideas so much as the language: it belonged to somewhere else.

The fourth attempt began not with a document but with two questions asked in the market square: what would you defend, and what would you rebuild? The plan was written afterwards, in the vocabulary the answers had provided.

The lesson was not sophisticated. Any plan people can recognise as their own becomes, quietly, a project. Any plan that cannot be recognised remains a paper — patient, but powerless.