Abstract
I am concerned about the future of planning. Planning is a necessary public activity in a democracy, and planning is a profession to which we all have devoted a significant portion of our lives and energies. As a public activity, it is threatened by the strength of Tea Parties and ultra-conservatives that dominate Congress with a know-nothing smugness not seen for many generations. As a profession with the context created by these forces, it is tempting to retreat from active pursuit of its founding principles toward accepting the status quo and a socially heedless effort to make that status quo function more efficiently.
I need not elaborate about the wider context. We have crises in housing, with mortgage foreclosures in the millions and disappearing affordability of housing for the majority; crises in education, with rising drop-out rates and inaccessible higher education for many; crises in the environment, with catastrophes looming; crises in the economy, with unemployment widespread and long-term; wars wasting our resources and our humanity; a failed healthcare system; and so on and on. If you listen to the debates among Republican candidates, or look at the policies that, whether as matters of necessity or matters of strategy, are being adopted by the current administration, the picture is gloomy indeed. In our own field, planning, private mega-projects causing widespread displacement are the order of the day, while privatization of public services, their reduction, and their conversion to reliance on ability to pay, is rampant. There is real cause for concern.
Our profession of planning has always had three streams within it. First, it originated in a radical utopian current deeply critical of an unsatisfactory industrialization and challenging capitalism as the only driving force in urban development. Second, it blended into a reformist stream hoping to ameliorate the worst excesses of that process but accepting its inevitability. Third, it was joined by a parallel technicist stream charged with preserving the status quo, downgrading planning to serve the profit-oriented market, but making that status quo more efficient and more stable.
Within planning education, these three currents are, of course, reflected. I see the third current, the technicist, growing. Our job is data gathering, policy evaluation, and policy formulation and design aimed at solving problems given us by our masters, public and private. Ours not to question values, not to explore alternatives not on the political table, but merely to take problems as defined and to solve them. I recently ran into a quote from Alan Altschuler, who stated the position succinctly 50 years ago:
The city planner, like almost everyone in American politics, controls so little of his environment that unquestioning acceptance of its major features is a condition of its own success.
“Unquestioning.” The approach is not one of moral unconcern, but of practical avoidance.
The second, reformist current becomes increasingly constrained in the planning we do: limit housing foreclosure by bribing banks to negotiate extended payments, provide broader health insurance coverage by giving insurance companies a larger market of healthy insured, show better educational results by more testing and charter schools.
The original, radical, utopian, current, concerned with broader and more-imaginative alternatives, is not much supported in most of what we do. Why point out that the problem of housing is its distribution primarily in a market based on ability to pay? Why explore non-market forms of provision and tenure? Why speak of a right to housing for all? No one is listening. Why speak of universal health care? This Congress won’t give it a second thought. Why call for a massive increase in funding for creative education, when we know funding is going to be cut, not expanded? Critical, radical, utopian, planning is a waste of time in our schools’ curricula.
I caricature, but with an uncomfortable kernel of truth. Our schools need to train professional planners, give them the necessary methodological tools, acquaint them with existing best practices, such as how to communicate needed improvements, how to design effective programs, how to read political realities and work within them. But what we do should not only be training but also education—educating our students to think critically and creatively about social problems, to puzzle out the meaning of social justice, to expose possibilities for broad alternatives to the way things are being done, to propose programs that move in the direction of fundamental human welfare. Educate them to understand and join in the effort to implement, to put into practice, to politicize, to expand the bounds of the possible. Training without critical education is unworthy of our profession and a disservice to our society.
But there is hope. The political climate is not all somber; the Occupy Wall Street movement is clearly bringing to the surface deep feelings of discontent and actively expressing values and ideals contrary to the prevailing neoconservative. Many of our students are deeply involved, and some of their skills are highly valued; they are combining study with action, exposing, proposing, politicizing. At conferences, panels on social justice have standing room audiences, Davidoff Awards go to books calling for planning to promote a Just City, attendees visit and march with the local Occupy Salt Lake City marchers. Ours is a wonderful profession, with all kinds of possibilities both for our own fulfillment and for contributing to a just society. I am happy to be part of it, grateful to have such ideas recognized, and ultimately hopeful that we can make a real contribution to the ideals we all hold dear.
Thank you.