What planners do: Power, politics, and persuasion

john forester

What planners do: Power, politics, and persuasion

john forester

visibility

…

description

1 page

link

1 file

~ Cities, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 217-235, 1996 Publishedby ElsevierScienceLtd. Printedin Great Britain 0264-2751/96$15.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Book reviews What Planners Do: Power Politics and Persuasion Charles Hoch Planners Press American Planning Association Chicago IL/Washington DC (1994) 364 pp Planning and what planners do are u n d e r review in many countries, whether in reaction to what the author of this book calls 'modern liberalism whose favourite institution is the market' or to the conflict between professional advice and participation. This review of the situation in the USA tackles both aspects. It starts from the premise that 'the failure to institutionalise professional planning as a function of executive authority at any level of government, has left planners vulnerable in a tough economic climate to political attack by enemies with greater authority'. As a result it is suggested that planners 'inhabit a precarious institutional and professional position stemming from the tension between individual purposes and the common good, and between professional judgement and citizen preferences'. The second aspect is approached first by reviewing the recent changes in the education and skills of planners. In the early 1950s virtually all professional planners had been trained or held undergraduate degrees in the design disciplines of architecture, landscape or engineering. By 1974 the overwhelming majority had degrees in social sciences or were graduates in planning. The author is associate professor in the School of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois and to find out what this new sort of planner does in this hostile environment he has interviewed 29 recent graduates in considerable depth about the work they they actually do and the resistance they encounter. They were selected from different sectors, scales and functions of planning activity and included ten women and six from minorities. The observations and reports of the interviews follow the method used by Patsy Healey in her research on a day in the life of a planner in the UK (published in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 1992). These interviews and assessments of them are the core of the book. The chapters are structured on the type of work being done, running from research and plan making through to racism and planning, and planning politics. In all this the author acknowledges that the 'stories' he tells deal with planners who 'negotiate and organise agreements that foster joint responsibility for solving difficult and unpopular problems' rather than those who design and regulate growth. He justifies this in the belief that 'the United States needs more people willing, prepared and able to carry out purposeful deliberations about the complex interdependencies that we experience as social and environmental problems'. To this end planning is defined as 'the use of reason and understanding to reduce collective uncertainties about the future'. The conclusion reached from this review is that planners 'remain on the margin of social importance even though the problems they address increasingly touch the lives of almost every one'. On the other hand the advice to the American Planning Association is that 'efforts to emphasise professional status and expertise are an impediment to nuturing and expanding planning deliberations among citizens with different occupational, ethnic, racial and religious affiliations'. The book as a whole is a revelation in its coverage of what the selected planners do and think about their job; and along the way we learn much about how the system actually works. The accounts of the interviews are perhaps over anecdotal but are well 217 analysed and set the scene for detailed conclusions on a number of themes. For those wishing to come to grips with the way planning is going in a society essentially antipathetic to the whole idea this makes fascinating reading, although the extended vocabulary, as illustrated perhaps by some of the quotations above, may need some patience to unravel. For those from a more regulated or overcrowded tradition, it is the method of interview and analysis which may well be most rewarding. Derek Lyddon formerly Chief Planner 31 Blackford Road Edinburgh EH9 2DT, UK Citizens and Cities: Urban Policy in the 1990s Dilys Hill Harvester Wheatsheaf London (1994) 262 + vii pp £10.95 (paperback) There is nothing peculiarly urban about citizenship if by this term we are referring to some kind of status attaching to all but a small number of people (such as tourists) living in a country. Citizens live in the countryside; their location does not (in theory) affect their status as citizens. And were it to do so, they might think it was not all that it was cracked up to be. There must therefore be a reason, other than alliteration why Dilys Hill has linked the 'urban' with the idea of citizenship in her book. (The subtitle about urban policy in the 1990s adds to the confusion.) There is an ambiguity that is never really resolved about whether this otherwise excellent book is about cities and urban problems and urban policies or about citizenship and its components. Certainly some of the threats to Hill's preferred view of citizenship are more likely to be present in cities, and this may provide the

Log In

What planners do: Power, politics, and persuasion

Related papers

Related papers

Related topics