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After the vast destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faces a rare chance to rebuild, with an unprecedented opportunity to plan what gets built. As the city's director of planning from 1992 until 2000, Kristina Ford is uniquely placed to use these opportunities as a springboard for an eye-opening discussion of the intransigent problems and promising possibilities facing city planners across the nation and beyond.In The Trouble with City Planning, Ford argues that almost no part of our usual understanding of the phrase "city planning" is accurate: not our conception of the plan itself, nor our sense of what city planners do or who plans are made for or how planners determine what citizens want. Most important, our conventional understanding does not tell us how a plan affects what gets built in any city in America.Ford advances several planning innovations that, if adopted, could be crucial for restoring New Orleans, but also transformative wherever citizens are troubled by the results of their city's plan. This keenly intelligent book is destined to become a classic for planners and citizens alike

One Images of the City -- 1. The Future Metropolis: Can It Be Made More Humane? -- 2. Great and Terrible Cities -- 3. The Educative City -- 4. The Form of the City -- 5. Images of the City in the Social Sciences -- Two The Metropolis and New Communities in the United States -- 6. Problems of the Metropolis: Changing Images and Realities -- 7. Conditions for a Successful New Communities Program -- 8. The New Communities Program and Why It Failed -- Three The Metropolis and City Planning in Third World Countries -- 9. Realism and Utopianism in City Planning: A Retrospective View -- 10. Changing Perspectives on Area Development Strategies -- Four Educational Dilemmas in City Planning -- 11. Four Approaches to Urban Studies -- 12. Training City Planners in Third World Countries -- Five City Planning: Promise and Reality -- 13. On the Illusions of City Planners -- 14. The Profession of City Planning -- Acknowledgments -- Notes.