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Let me take you on a Cook's tour of urban historic preservation outcomes in the United States. The undertaking is doubly complicated. First, I am an outsider from Australia, a nation that is known more for its sheep farms than for its cities—or, indeed, for a significant national history or a non- Aboriginal cultural heritage that is worth preserving. Second, the dislocation between subject matter and observer is further compounded because I am writing from the ancient Italian city of Parma. Here, in contrast both to the United States and Australia, a multiplicity of structures and artifacts dating back to Etruscan times makes manifest the depth and richness of the surrounding historical texture.

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been 'reading' streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were 'reflected' in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volumeThe Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade afterThe Victorian City'sfirst publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

Les systèmes d'information sur la performance des programmes n'ont pas donné, dans bien des cas, les résultats attendus, et cela parce qu'on n'a pas mis le soin voulu pour déterminer quels étaient les renseignements nécessaires et qui avait besoin de ces renseignements, et pour établir le lien entre ces éléments et les diverses caractéristiques des renseignements périodiques par apport aux renseignements permanents. L'information permanente est appropriée pour les besoins de la gestion et du contrôle directs des programmes, et pour l'imputabilité des gestionnaires. Elle ne se prête pas très bien à l'utilisation comme intrant des décisions de stratégie ou de ressourcement d'envergure. L'information périodique, notamment celle qui est fournie par l'évaluation des programmes, convient à l'utilisation pour la prise de décisions de stratégie ainsi qu'à la préparation des comptes à rendre au Cabinet et au Parlement au sujet des programmes. Cette information par contre ne convient pas très bien à la gestion et au contrôle de programme. Pour qu'ils servent avec efficacité, les systèmes d'information sur la performance des programmes au sein du gouvernement doivent faire une distinction bien nette entre ces modes d'utilisation, décider du type d'information qui est approprié, et procéder avec parcimonie en ce qui a trait à la nature et à la quantité de l'information produite.