City Planning and Political Values

Abstract

City planners have increasingly come to interpret their mandate as a broad demand for social planning. In response to the many criticisms of master planning and urban renewal design as naive attempts to change society through manipulation of the physical environment, city planners have begun to seek wide training in the social sciences and to produce grand designs for social change. The recent New York Master Plan is an archetypal example. Moreover, the requirements of much federal urban legislation mean that cities must produce plans or forfeit aid. As the breadth of planning increases, as it affects more and more aspects of the urban environment, and as a growing number of cities enact plans of various sorts, it becomes important to understand the political implications of different kinds of planning. While the planner himself may not be a political figure, an enacted urban plan constitutes the substance of a political decision. In Lasswell’s terms (1958: 13), it determines who gets what. Thus, even though many aspects of the planning process are

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