Notes on Planning Theory for Pra

Part 1 Introduction

Chapter 1 Planning Practice and Political Power

Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber proposed the term wicked to describe the problems typically addressed by planners.

Wicked problems: definitions, causes, and solutions remain elusive; and planners are subject to numerous external influences that assist in shaping their roles and responsibilities. It is ill- and variously defined; often feature a lack of consensus regarding their causes; lack obvious solutions – or even agreement on criteria for determining when a solution has been achieved; and have numerous and often unfathomable links to other problems.

Why have we been unable, thus far, to solve the problems of homelessness, or crime, or inadequate schools? The simple answer is that these are indeed wicked problems, as are most of those within the planner’s purview.

In addressing such issues, planners do not operate in a vacuum; on the contrary, they are subject, at any given time, to a number of external forces beyond their control.

Nigel Taylor’s words, “planning action can significantly affect the lives of large numbers of people, and since different individuals and groups may hold different views about how the environment should be planned, based on different values and interests, it is therefore also a political activity.”

Chapter 2 Planning Practice and Planning Theory

John Forester, “planning theory is what planners need when they get stuck; another way to formulate a problem, a way to anticipate outcomes, a source of reminders about what is important, a way of paying attention that provides direction, strategy, and coherence.”

More generally, I view planning theory as the process component of our profession; it guides us through a continuous self-examination of what it is we are doing, how we are doing it, why, for whom, and with what results. In short, it is a vehicle for professional introspection about our roles as planners.

Two types:

(1) Positive (empirical or descriptive) theories attempt to explain the relationship between two or more variables – concepts, actions, objects, events, qualities, and so forth – in order to generate predictions about phenomena not yet observed. How things operate.

(2) Normative theories, prescribe what the relationship between the variables in question should be in order to produce results that are deemed desirable. How they should operate.

a) Ethical normative theory – prescribes a given relationship because of its ‘rightness’ in view of some external principle.

b) Functional normative theory – is complete in itself and thus requires no external principle. A particular way of doing things is prescribed simply because it is deemed a good way (more workable, more productive, more efficient) to proceed.

Planners reading the ethical normative literature are typically urged to carry out their professional activities in a manner that manifests those values.

Is there a set of value that are fundamental to the planning profession and that should therefore be held by all planners? If not, how do we decide which values should prevail in any given instance?

Theory – practice gap

Planning theory now – attention has shifted to theories about and of planning.

Central question of planning theory as the following: what role can planning play in developing the city and region within the constraints of a capitalist political economy and a democratic political system?

Part 2 Foundations of Public Planning

Chapter 3 Running the Gauntlet of Planning Critics

Perilous – There is much in the history and traditions of the United States – the Protestant ethic, the spirit of “rugged individualism”. Capitalism – individual entrepreneurship – laissez-faire capitalism

Planning effectiveness requires a concentration of central power, which inevitably leads to a loss of individual freedom.

Impossible – Planning fails, then, to carry out its basic purpose. In 1973, Aaron Wildavsky, UCBerkely, “If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing”. He argues, in brief, planning to be valid must guide governmental decisions – that is, it must govern; otherwise there is no reason to do it. In reality, however, planning never governs, and thus is rarely successful or even accurate in its projections for the future.

Planning is a pervasive activity, and that virtually every organization and institution must plan continuously in order to fulfill its mission and remain in existence.

Impotent – planning rested firmly in the hands of governmental and business elites that used it to impose their own values, manipulate the public, and control resources (and the wealth that those resources generated).

Planning does not occur in a vacuum, but in a social, political, and economic context. Planning cannot be analyzed in a meaningful way without considering the larger system of which it is a part.

Malevolent – dark-side theorists

Unconstitutional – eminent domain

Alive and well – I suspect that planning has thrived, in part, because planners are good at adapting to changes in the national mood. More fundamentally, however, planning continues to prosper because planners carry out essential activities that are performed by no other profession or group.

The question is not whether planning should exist but how it should be done and who should be involved, and in what capacities.

Why we plan???

Chapter 4 Rationales for Public Planning

Richard Klosterman 1985 “Arguments for and against Planning”

(1) Planning provides the data needed for effective public and private decision-making.

(2) Planning promotes the common or collective interests of the community, particularly with respect to the provision of public goods.

(3) Planning attempts to remedy the negative effects of market actions.

(4) Planning considers the distributional effects of public and private action, and attempts to resolve inequities in the distribution of basic goods and services.

Linda Davis, a Portland, Oregon, planning consultant with considerable public agency experience as well,

What is the “public interest”? Admittedly, this is hard to define, and the longer you are engaged in the profession the more you see that the world is not black and white, but shades of gray… Today I like to think of public interest more in terms of “community interest”.

“What is good for the community?”

In fact, that values – those of the planner, and those of the diverse individuals and communities whom the planner serves – constitute the real bedrock of planning. Planners plan ultimately, because they hold values that impel them to do so. Those values will not always prevail, of course. Virtually everything that is done under the aegis of planning involves a body of divergent values that must ultimately be reconciled sufficiently to justify an action.

Chapter 5 The Critical Role of Values and Ethics

Rational decision-making (before, say, the 1970s), theorists were inclined to see planning as a manifestation of utilitarianism, a body of theory originally developed by Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century English philosopher. As described by Thomas Harper and Stanley Stein, utilitarian theory judges the best course of action to be “one that maximizes the sum of total of whatever is intrinsically good – usually happiness or well-being.” – The planner’s role is to produce the greatest good for the greatest number – a notion that is easily equated with the concept of the public interest and is readily served by cost-benefit analysis and other techniques aimed at maximizing positive outcomes.

Today planning theorists has for the most part, rejected utilitarianism. Its fatal flaw, as a fundamental value for public planning, is that it focuses on maximizing the sum total of a particular good at the societal (or community) level but pays no attention to individual shares of that good; in other words, it ignores the manner in which the benefits produced by planning are to be distributed – and in fact provides a basis for using the public interest as an excuse or actions that may do great harm to some individuals.

Libertarianism – “the free, equal, and autonomous individual person as the basic unit of society”

Communitarianism – “balance between individual and the community as a whole”

John Rawls, provide the greatest benefits to the least advantaged.

Fluid value system - Different planners subscribe to different sets of values, and what is important to one may be of no concern whatsoever to another. Moreover, our values are subject to change over time, reflecting – among other causes – changes in our life circumstances.

The practice of cultivating oneself - What the absence of such an overarching statement means, however, is that the most important processes involving values and ethics are ultimately internal to each individual planner. As professionals, then, each of us should be engaged in a never-ending quest for ethical behavior based on the values of greatest importance to us. （修行）

There is no such thing of a definitive and universal set of ethics that will cover all situations. Self-awareness, introspection, and sensitivity to the values nuances of practice – these are major virtues that every planner should possess.

Above all, each planner should formulate an individual and highly personal conception of what constitutes ethical professional behavior, based on his or her own value system. With such a conception, planning is a distinguished and noble profession; without it, planning is simply… a job.

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Indeed, the bedrock of public planning is made up of the values and ethics of those who practice it. The profession’s foundation is only as solid as the body of values on which it is based.

Part 3 Alternative Paradigms for Public Planning Introduction

Chapter6 Centralized Rationality: The Planner as Applied Scientist

The rational model is still widely invoked in the world of planning practice.

The simple way of describing the rational model:

(1) Goals.

(2) Alternatives

(3) Consequences

(4) Choices

(5) Implementation

(6) Evaluation

The latest contender: the strategic planning

(1) A mission statement

(2) A ‘SWOT’ analysis

(3) An analysis of specific issues

(4) The development of a detailed and compelling vision for the organization’s future

(5) The development of a set of action strategies for achieving that vision

Nigel Taylor suggested that the notion of planning as a rational process, coupled with the view of cities as systems that are amenable to scientifically engineered improvement, represented the “high water-mark of modernist optimism in the post-war era”.

The fundamental problem with rationality is not that it is a modernist strategy in a postmodern world, as numerous theorists have alleged. Rather, my concern is that reliance on rational models is dysfunctional because decisions relevant to public planning are not generally made on the basis of rational planning processes.

Reliance on rationality may, in fact, be highly damaging to the planning process because it contributes so readily to self-delusion.

To summarize, there is a tension in our nation (and I suspect in most nations) between rational planning and the political system. Because the fail to deal with that tension, most rationality-based planning strategies will ultimately prove disappointing to the planner.

Chapter 7 Centralized Non-Rationality: The Planner Confronts Politics

Charles Lindblom, 1959, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’”. The method of successive limited comparisons in contrast to the traditional “rational-comprehensive method”.

Incrementalism – several “adaptations” or “tactics” that decision-makers use in order to cope with the realities o the policy-making environment.

(1) Decision-makers compare and evaluate increments only.

(2) Decision-makers consider only a restricted number of policy alternatives.

(3) Decision-makers consider only a restricted number of important consequences for any given policy alternatives.

(4) Decision-makers engage in “reconstructive analysis”.

(5) Decision-makers carry out their analyses and evaluations seriously.

(6) Decision-makers have a remedial orientation.

The decision-maker makes an incremental move in the desired direction and does not take upon himself the difficulties of finding a solution. He disregards many other possible moves because they are too costly (in time, energy, or money) to examine; and, for the move he makes, he does not trouble to find out (again, because it is too costly to do so) what all its consequences are. He assumes that to the extent that his move was a failure or was marked by unanticipated adverse consequences, someone’s (perhaps even his) next move will attend to the resulting problem.

Amitai Etzioni – “mixed scanning” strategy, intended as a compromise between the rational and incremental approaches – supposedly containing the virtues of both and the defects of neither.

The distinction between “contextuating” decisions and “bit” decisions.

Top-down: Contextuating decisions: fundamental policy-shaping decisions, tend to be made by those higher in an organization’s hierarchy, and are more apt to be based on a careful analysis of the options.

Bottom-up: Bit decisions: focus more on implementation than on policy-making, tend to be made at lower levels, and are thus more apt to reflect the characteristics of incrementalism as described by Lindblom.

Chapter 8 Decentralized Rationality: The Planner as Political Activist

Paul Davidoff, who introduced the concept of advocacy to the planning profession.

In theory, the advocacy planner continued to plan in a pragmatically rational manner, but defined the client in far narrower terms than had the more traditional community-wide comprehensive planner. In so doing, by the way, the advocacy planner improved the likelihood that the client group’s values – at least those relevant to the problem at hand – would be somewhat homogeneous, and thus more susceptible to rational treatment.

Community Design Center was a product of advocacy planning thinking – might be political naïve and it is the spirit rather strategy.

1. The most important and lasting contribution of the advocacy movement was its success in pulling planners away from the idea that planning’s primary purpose was to serve a unitary public interest. Advocacy made it legitimate for planners to focus their efforts on the needs of particular subgroups – the poor and powerless, certainly, but many others as well.

2. Advocacy is largely about values. It entails a conscious decision to act in accordance with a particular set of values. And since virtually all planners have values that are important to them in their professional practice, it follows that virtually all planners are advocates as well. This underscores, once more, the importance of being introspective about what we are doing, and for whom we are doing it.

Chapter 9 Decentrailized Non-Rationality: The Planner as Communicator

Postmodern

The world of the late 20^th century is characterized by fragmented power; distrust of government and experts; multiple, seemingly incommensurable discourse; and anew tribalism, where groups celebrate their differences.

Planning as communicative action

Place great emphasis on the fact that planning communications are not just exchanges of words but reflect a variety of institutional, political, and power relationships.

Nigel Taylor notes, the idea is not simply that communication is an important aspect of the planning process, but rather that it is the very essence of that process. For communicative action theorists, planning ‘ can best be viewed as a process of practical deliberation involving dialogue, debates, and negotiation among planners, politicians, developers, and the public.’

Connie Ozawa and Ethan Seltzer write, the planner is not an analyst working behind closed doors to eventually produce the most rational recommendation but an active and intentional participant in a process of public discourse and social change.

John Forester, long argued that we need to view what planners do as ‘attention-shaping, communicative action rather than as instrumental action, as means to particular ends.’ ‘Shape others’ expectations, beliefs, hopes, and understandings, even though planners do not strictly control any of these outcomes.’

Implications for practice

Meditated negotiations in local land-use processes are no panacea for the structural problems of our society. But when local conflicts involve many issues, when differences in interests can be exploited by trading to achieve joint gains, and when diverse interests rather than fundamental rights are at stake, then mediated negotiation strategies or planner make good sense, politically and practically.

The role of facilitator has been around for a long time, what is new here is Innes’s emphasis on facilitation as a major technique for planners, and her linkage of this role to some o the historically elusive concepts of planning practice.

In April 1998, Yiftachel does note that communicative action was one of the two approaches afforded the greatest attention at the conference, the other being what he calls the ‘critical approach’ (dark side of planning).

Issues:

1. Only some of the planner’s activities are indeed communicative.

2. Communicative action literature tends to romanticize the inherent nobility of citizens’ values and preferences. (information biased and human and selfish in nature)

3. Many of the issues planners confront are probably not amenable to resolution by such means.

4. Even when an issue is deemed appropriate for mediated negotiation or consensus building, there is no guarantee that such a process will succeed.

5. Even when a compromise or consensus can be reached, it will sometimes be accompanied by (and perhaps even result from) the continued domination or marginalization of one or another individual or group participating in the process.

6. Michael Neuman has criticized communicative action theory for its emphasis on process at the expense of content. (Lack of images?)

The mere fact that planning scholars focus their theoretical work on practice does not close the gap; indeed, if they are planning scholars, one might reasonably ask what else they would focus on. Communication between practitioners and theorists is a two-way street, and the traffic will be light, I suggest, as long as the role of practitioners in the planning theory enterprise continues to be primarily that of serving as objects of analysis and critique, rather than as full partners in a process aimed at maximizing the quality of the profession’s performance.

Communicative action theorists have emphasized a set of methods – mediated negotiation, consensus building, and other dispute-resolution and group decision-making techniques- that can be quite useful under certain circumstances.

Part Four Toward a More Practical Strategy

Throughout the history of the planning profession, authors have been urging planners to embrace a seemingly endless array of roles. A case has been made, at one time or another, for the planner as master designer, rational analyst, social change agent, visionary, negotiator, monitor of communication flows, storytellers, advocate, social interventionist, political strategist, specialist in comprehensiveness, customer service facilitator, and others too numerous to mention.

It is quite likely, then, that we would do well to abandon our quest for a single, overarching, discipline-defining paradigm. Instead, we should celebrate the rich diversity of the strategies that are available, and focus on learning how to match particular strategies to the circumstances at hand. We should stop looking for a unified filed theory, a single common measure of excellence, … and we should instead explore the real possibilities to improve planning practices so that they serve human need.

Present a perspective – and ultimately strategy – intended to strike a workable balance between planning as a political process and planning as a creative act of shaping the future.

Chapter 10 Setting the Stage: Ideas, Feedback, Goals – and Trial Balloons

Etzioni addresses the question of sources for ideas by positing a three-filter screen through which ideas pass on their road to implementation. In Etizioni’s view, each of three kinds of societal elites – intellectual, expert, and political – constitutes a ‘filter’.

“A society that is free to test its ideas and to try out fundamentally new ones cannot be restricted to approaching the world and itself merely through the narrow political filter of the elites in power.”

The intellectual filter is the most open one; ideas are approved with comparative ease, especially if they are not in open conflict with a major body of known facts. Intellectual screening is more evaluative than empirical and more concerned with value-relevance and ‘coverage’ than with reality-testing.

The expert filter is considerably less open and admits mainly ideas that withstand some kind of empirical test.

The political filter is the most narrow for it allows only one or two alternatives to pass through it – those which the elite will seek to implement.

The ideas propelling our society forward are as likely to emerge from the grass roots as they are from universities, think tanks, and laboratories.

The Typology of the sources of alternatives used by planners

My guess is that we would find influence-wielders to be the most common sources of alternatives followed by reference groups. (Figure 10-1)

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The critical role of feedbacks

Just as the social and political context affects a planner’s choice of alternatives to consider, so does it affect his or her choices among those alternatives. People in the planner’s work environment – superiors and colleagues, clients, power figures, and so on – are often aware of at least some of the alternatives under consideration, and will ‘feed back’ a variety of responses and pressures that inevitably help to shape the planner’s decision.

The entire planning process – from the emergence of a problem to be tackled to the implementation of a course of action for dealing with it – is strongly affected by a number of forces external to the planner. These forces are communicated to the planner most concretely, I suggest, in the form of feedback to actions proposed or taken.

Formulating workable goals: Easier Said Than Done

The planner’s relationship to citizen participation could be improved significantly by a more realistic division o labor between citizens and planners. I further suggest that a reasonable, and potentially fruitful, division is one in which citizens are responsible for goal formulation, while the planner’s primary task is the design of courses of action intended to achieve these goals.

Concern with goals is a central feature o the planning process. Robert Young:’ differs from engineering, designing, or just plain problem-solving in that for these activities the goals or objectives are given; in planning, the determination of the goals assumes equal importance with the design that is meant to achieve them.’

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The benefits of creative trial ballooning

Trial balloon: an idea presented, or an action undertaken, for the express purpose of generating feedback.

Public goals are diverse and often in conflict, which is impossible, therefore, to produce a single, rank-ordered set of goals that reflects the collective preferences of an entire community. This being the case, the planner must ultimately identify, in any given planning activity, that subgroup whose needs he or she is most interested in addressing. This group is the planner’s primary client group for that particular activity. This sounds like advocacy planning.

What if, as often happens, the goals of the planner’s client group conflict with those of other groups in the community? In this case, the planner has three options: Opt out, mediate an acceptable outcome, or become an advocate.

Planners who plan in this manner have a strong and creative role – namely, the design of courses of actions that are consistent with the goals of their client groups.

Chapter 11 The feedback strategy of public planning

Planning as social experimentation

The feedback strategy presented in this chapter reflects an explicitly experimental orientation to the planning process, and there are compelling reasons for planning in this manner.

No certainty ----

Rarely, if ever, do we know with certainly what the single best course of action is with regard to a particular problem, yet we often behave as though there were no doubt about the correctness of our decision.

If each planning action were conceived and designed as an experiment – as a means of acquiring additional information about the effectiveness of a given course of action in achieving the goals of a client group – then our body of knowledge about problem-solving and goal-achieving strategies would expand continuously. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to view planning as a process of social experimentation wherein ideas are tested – and continuously evaluated – against the possibilities and constraints of reality.

An experimental orientation requires that evaluations be carried out on a regular basis. Two kinds of evaluations are important: Impact (effective in solving the problems) & Attitude. In practice, however, evaluation tends to occur only rarely; pressing current problems have a way of moving the evaluation of past actions to the back burner – often with unfortunate results.

The habits of effective planners

In practice, the Feedback Strategy is more appropriately viewed as an attitude toward the planning process than as a set of procedures to be carried out in lockstep fashion.

The strategy in fact builds in politics as a component of the planning process, rather than viewing it as a dysfunctional external disturbance or barrier. The strategy views planning explicitly as an exercise in trial ballooning, and includes instructions for learning from and responding to the feedback generated by the trial balloons floated by the planner.

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1. The effective planner will take pains to ensure that the problem is defined operationally at the outset. (If it is clear that the problem, or some of its component parts, cannot be addressed through the local planning process, the problem should be transferred to a more appropriate arena – political body perhaps)

At the stage, no effort be made to formulate goals and objectives even after consulting relevant client groups.

2. How extensively, and by what methods, should each alternative be assessed? Effective planners generally evaluate each alternative as fully- and with as sophisticated a set of methods – as the situation permits.

Consider:1) the resources at the planner’s disposal (funds, staff, expertise, and equipment); 2) deadlines; 3) the political constraints on analysis, involving some combination of the number of people and organizations that have generated alternatives.

3. Criteria:

Client groups do not care, with low visibility – cost-benefit analysis;

Political feasibility;

The planner’s perception

…

A set of filters:

With the economic and political constraints of the situation, best fits the client group’s needs.

4. Design and implement and experiment on the preliminary choice of alternatives

5. The strategy urges us to learn from experience. Evaluation gives both planners and relevant others information on which to base final decisions about a course of actions.

Two kinds of evaluations are important: Impact (effective in solving the problems) & Attitude.

Can be social scientific research methodology

Or feedbacks from social media; focal groups; case studies students’ term paper etc.

6. The single legitimate criterion for making the disposing decision is the compatibility of a course of action with the goals of the client group whose well-being it is intended to address.

In short, the disposing decision should controlled by the planner’s client group.

Part 5 Effective Planning in a Political Milieu

Chapter 12 The Political Savvy Planner

The Nature of Political Savvy

To be effective in the ‘messy world of urban politics,’ Norman Krumholz and John Forester have written, planners must be ‘professionally able, organizationally astute, and most of all, politically articulate’.

It did not mean back-room deal making.

It does not mean that planners must be politicians themselves, but to use the political system effectively, to operate in a politically savvy manner.

The elements of political savvy

(1) A planner should be able to assess the possibilities and constraints of a particular situation in a reasonably accurate manner. No rashness or timidity.

(2) Closely related to an accurate assessment of a situation is a keen sense of timing.

(3) A politically savvy planner must have outstanding communication skills.

(4) Planners should be effective negotiators.

(5) Yet another element of political savvy is the ability to make effective use of a community’s power relationships in striving for desired outomes.

(6) The political savvy planner must have a well-developed system of values that provides direction to his or her professional activities.

(7) Finally, the politically savvy planner should possess a compelling vision of what the community ought to be like in the future.

Chapter 13 Vision

The importance of vision

The profession was in danger of losing the ‘reformist, visionary, future-oriented spirit’ that had initially attracted so many of us to planning careers.

---- Four Critical Junctures in the History of the Urban Planning Profession:

An Exercise in Hindsight

This task as a matter of confronts and deals with the soul of the profession. It is a soul enriched by the works of creative and dedicated figures in our history – Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burham, Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, Clarence Perry, Rexford Guy Tugwell, and many others. It is a soul influenced immeasurably by those – Paul Davidoff comes quickly to mind – who have reminded us of the critical responsibilities we bear for the well-being of all who reside in the communities we purport to serve. And fortunately, it is a soul that still receives nourishment from many planners who strive to serve the underlying values of the profession.

Donald Krueckeberg why he had chosen to become a planner: ‘to pursue a humanistic vision’ and ‘a worthwhile utopia’.

Norman Krumholz’s less sanguine observation, that most planners are ordinary bureaucarts seeking a secure career, some status, and regular increases in salary.’

Implicit in that contrast, I suggested, was ‘the field on which the battle for the profession’s soul will take place.’

The profession needs a new generation of visionaries, people who dream of a better world, and who are capable of designing the means to attain it. That, after all, is the essence of planning: to visualize the ideal future community, and to work toward its realization. It is a much-needed role in our cities, and young men and women continue to enter the profession because they want to perform that role. Let us nurture their instincts, and thereby restore the urban planning profession to its historical mission.

Planners are visionary and technician.

The concept of effectiveness is meaningless unless it is integrated with a compelling vision of an improved urban society. It is not enough to settle for the politician’s conception of effectiveness, or the developer’s. Planners bear responsibility for increasing the level of public awareness about future possibilities, about what our communities are capable of becoming; we are responsible for helping communities define their desired future, and for helping them achieve it. I reject, then, a dichotomy between the planner as visionary and the planner as a technician who gets things done. Each of these perspectives must inform the other, and we are an incomplete profession if we settle for only one of them.

Vision means…

· A long-range perspective;

· Being less interested in forecasting the future than in creating it;

· Involving as many individuals and group s as possible in the process of dreaming about what might be, and of planning how to make it happen;

· Focusing on all dimensions of the quality of life in our communities, not just on economic bottom lines;

· Dealing creatively and effectively with equity issues;

· Having a strong and compelling conception of the good community.

How to be a visionary – and keep your job

Characterized by the Reagan administration – the nation was becoming less public-serving, more private- and self-serving. President Kennedy’s “Ask what you can do for your country” had shifted to “What’s in it for me?” Among its other effects, this paradigm shift made it more difficult for the planning profession to retain the visionary, idealistic, even utopian spirit that had once characterized it.

Visionary planning does not need to be a grandiose process carried out on an epic or heroic scale. You pull all the pieces together and move toward a vision for a particular city.

I see a planner as a guardian of ideas and dreams, entrusted with their safety. Almost anyone can administer regulations, but few can administer a vision.

---- Kevin Kennedy