Decisions we make today shape and direct our future. But we usually know little about how these decisions will work out. To find out, planners and designers create enticing images of the future. These scenarios serve as pathfinders between imagination and reason. In the late 1980s, the avant-garde among Dutch planners and designers created a number of unprecedentedly large-scale scenarios to convince the public of their ideas. But this quest to reshape the Netherlands failed miserably. However, their efforts did unleash a new way of thinking about the future and created a large number of spectacular images of the future. The book "Dutch New Worlds. Scenarios in Urbanism and Spatial Planning in the Netherlands, 1970-2000' tells for the first time how scenario thinking changed urbanism and spatial planning, from its beginnings in the late 1960s to its peak in the 1990s. It shows how many grand scenario projects came to nothing because of overambition or misplaced application. However, it also shows that a scenario remains a powerful tool for purposeful and transparent design research in making better cities and regions. Told from the perspective of a non-Dutch architect and urbanist, this history of ideas provides a number of refreshing insights and basic lessons to planners, designers and policy makers that can be useful in making new decisions that will shape and direct our future.