PLANNING CULTURES IN TRANSITION

Abstract

As a professional field, urban planning is an institutionally embedded practice. It is also a practice that is inevitably interwoven with politics, with ongoing conflicts over the allocation and use of public and private resources. This politics is institutionally embedded as well. It follows that the activity of planning is understood and practiced differently in different institutional settings that vary significantly across countries and even cities. Moreover, within any given setting, planning must continuously reinvent itself as circumstances change. In contemporary societies, politics, institutions, economies, technologies, and social values are all subject to continuous, often radical, change, so planners often feel beleaguered, their profession perpetually on the brink of an existential crisis. Consider only the changes that have overtaken us in the United States over the last two decades, challenging planners: the emergence of giant metropolitan regions, the new politics of cultural identity, massive immigration, the growing demands for an environmentally sustainable development, the increasing activism at local community levels, the withdrawal of the federal government from major involvement with urban and suburban issues, globalization, the arrival of a post-industrial economy, new hard technologies such as GIS and soft ones such as mediation and negotiation, the Worldwide Web-everyone can make a list. But by whatever criterion, the last two decades have been indisputably ones of massive change. Other countries have been similarly challenged, and each has responded in its own particular way.

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