Suchergebnisse

Practical judgment & planning -- Emotional intelligence in planning judgment -- Integrating the planning field, movement and discipline -- Anticipating complex spatial change -- Planning imagination : utopia, scenario & plan -- Crafting plans -- Evaluating plans -- How planning theory informs planning practice -- Planning spatial community in a complex society -- Ethical planning judgment.

The concepts utopia, scenario, and plan offer important ways to envision the future of place. Utopia describes the perfect, complete place. Scenario compares good alternative stories. Plans offer useful provisional intentions. All three help us imagine how future consequences of select actions might influence current expectations and hopes. I argue that pragmatism can integrate all three along a continuum from holistic inclusive to selective incremental. Utopia dramatizes emotional attachments to the daily details of a purposeful way of life for some future imagined place. Scenario describes the confluence of narrative and explanation, story and cause as coherent testable accounts of relevant consequences for plausible futures. Plan describes how we compose and compare alternatives to inform practical intentions for choices and decisions for immediate problems we currently face. Framing the three concepts pragmatically avoids the contrast between utopian rupture and narrative continuity by treating both as complementary aspects of a practical imagination. Composing plans requires adaptive attention to specific features of people and place susceptible to purposeful change.

Conceiving urban plan making as practical judgment shifts theoretical attention from questions of belief to questions of meaning. How do we make urban plans that combine intelligent coordination with savvy communication to anticipate and cope with urban complexity? Consider adopting a pragmatic approach that relies on coherence to inform the appraisal, comparison and selection that accompany practical judgment. Plans compose the meaning and consequence of future actions. Pragmatic composition combines representation and interpretation to frame problems of urban complexity. Four orientations are described using plan examples: protocol, precedent, prototype and policy.

Conceiving planning theory as a kind of practical reason shifts attention from making rational arguments justifying planning beliefs to the study of plan-making as a feature of practical reasoning. Adopting this viewpoint allows for the comparison of what rational planning theory keeps apart: theories about plan-making that focus on the representation of urban development (e.g. Lew Hopkins) and theories that study the intentional features of deliberative planning processes (e.g. Judith Innes). Analysis demonstrates that the seemingly incompatible viewpoints can offer complementary insights about plan-making without diminishing or distorting important differences. There need be no epistemic or theoretical gap separating the representation and intention of plan-making; no big difference between substance and process. The differences are practical.

Hugh Miller's argument that philosopher Richard Rorty offers a pragmatic upgrade for public administration does not work. However, the critics, in defending old pragmatism against new, miss some useful insights. Rorty basically helps us to grasp the hubris of claiming epistemic trump and to beware the quest for certainty in the service of the powerful. For instance, how would pragmatic ideas compare with more conventional theoretical expectations rationalizing the recent combination of federal intelligence agencies into a new Homeland Security Agency? Rorty describes and celebrates the critical irony of self-perfection as a resource best nurtured in private while insisting that public expectations be shaped by practical alternatives sensitive to compromise and consensus. We theorists should not be distracted by philosophical debate but focus instead on inventing and comparing practical organizational alternatives that meet public needs without sacrificing individual freedom.

How do we plan for collective decision-making without sacrificing the benefits of democratic pluralism to planning demands for rational consensus or precision? Seymour Mandelbaum argues that we adopt and promote open moral communities. Using ideas of political theorist James Bohman, I review and critique Mandelbaum's emphasis on critical irony and communitarian sensibility as these take for granted the important role planning plays helping us coordinate and cope with social complexity in modern societies. We can take Mandelbaum's critical insight that we enliven and improve the quality of public deliberation using a robust pluralism. However, binding that pluralism together will take more than respectful reciprocity and civic virtue, it requires that we do plans and planning to help guide collective decisions in an increasingly complex and interdependent world. Planning and plan-making play an important role coordinating these complex relationships. I offer two brief planning examples - one fitting Mandelbaum's ideal and another that does not to show how a plan can still offer practical guidance even as the deliberations that frame it fail.

Historical data are used to support the argument that the popularity of municipal contracting in Los Angeles County (the Lakewood Plan) resulted not from its adoption by local suburban residents seeking more efficient urban service provision, but rather from its use by members of local class organizations in order to create municipal boundaries that would surround and protect their territorial interests. The class position and objectives of political actors involved in 46 incorporation attempts in Los Angeles County provide evidence demonstrating how the conflicts and outcomes of the incorporation process were class based.

In this article I take up the topic of plan evaluation. I compare two approaches. One approach uses Rational analysis, the other pragmatic reasoning. I argue that planners should place less emphasis on rational analysis and adopt a distinctly pragmatic approach when evaluating plans. Analysis may offer objectivity and precision, but it sacrifices context and continuity. A pragmatic outlook embraces context and seeks continuity among diverse viewpoints. It avoids the separation between analysis and action, providing a useful rationale for what some practitioners might call common sense judgment.