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Reprofessionalizing Planning: PragmaticModel for Planners

William Hatcher, Ph.D.Associate Professor, Dept. of Government, Eastern Kentucky Univ.,521 Lancaster Ave., Richmond, KY 40475 (corresponding author). E-mail:william.hatcher@eku.edu

Gerald Andrews Emison, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCEProfessor, Dept. of Political Science and Public Administration, MississippiState Univ., P.O. Box PC, Mississippi State, MS 39762. E-mail: emison@pspa.msstate.edu

DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000179

Introduction: Dilemmas of Practice

Theory for planners is a mixed blessing. It helps confront a novelsituation, and it can frame future tasks. But for theory to bevaluable, it needs to enhance the discharge of professional respon-sibilities in the here and now. We argue in this paper that planners’effectiveness today is hampered by critical theory that encouragesplanners to favor democratic deliberation over more value-neutralskills. The modern planning theory, inspired by critical theory,argues for planners to be advocates for certain groups, in effectbecoming politicians rather than professional advisors. As a re-sponse, we suggest planning theory become more pragmatic. Thiscan better align conditions and responsibilities of planners. It willlead to a reprofessionalization of planning that more closely reflectsconditions that most practicing planners face. A few practical casesillustrate this need for reprofessionalization.

The junior planner sat in the audience as the county council, forwhom he was the environmental policy coordinator, met with thesanitary commission. The commission, which provided water andsewer services for the region, sought council approval of a programto improve water supply. The discussion between the council andthe commission turned to steps in obtaining construction permitsfrom federal and state authorities. As the young planner listenedto the commissioners’ responses to the council members’ ques-tions, he realized the responses did not accurately convey the timedelays the project faced if it followed the sanitary commissioners’recommendation. He knew there were other alternatives with likelyreduced consequences from the council’s perspective but not thecommissioners. What was he to do?

Ten years later this same planner was leading the federal airquality planning program. His staff planners and engineers werelocked in a disagreement with research scientists about appropriateuse of data. The matter was before the administrator of EPA to de-cide. Should data on phosgene’s health effects be used to regulatethis hazardous air pollutant, even if the data came from Nazi deathcamp experiences? If the data were set aside, there was no basis forregulation. If it were used, this implied validation of heinouscrimes. The agency had never confronted such conflict. Whichway should he turn: toward regulation that protected human expo-sure yet employed tainted data, or toward no regulation that resistedtainted data yet left the public at some risk?

In these cases, which describe actual events, contemporary plan-ning theory did not suffice. The view of planner as responsible foracting in concord with planning as democratic deliberation simplywas inadequate. The planner wanted to act in a manner consistentwith professionalism but such action was not clear. Is there anotherline of professionalism that might be helpful in such situations?This paper proposes such a route.

Planning Theory’s Failings

Modern planning theory has embraced the roles of planners asactivist participants in the political process. From Paul Davidoff’sadvocacy planning to John Dryzek’s planning and argumentation,major theorists have prescribed planners’ roles that expand engage-ment in value definition and its associated politics. This view ofplanning is rooted in the idealistic philosophies of human commu-nication put forth by Jürgen Habermas and critical theory’s critiqueof the planning profession. It has substituted a desired outcome,political acceptability, for application of methods. This foundationfor modern planning theory has produced planners who havestrayed from the intellectual core of planning by becoming moreinvolved in political decision-making than providing professionaladvice. By being advocates, planners run the risk of doing the workof elected officials rather than providing sound technical advice.Mainstream theory, which calls for planners to be participants indemocratic deliberations, did not equip the planner previouslydiscussed with a helpful guide and will not equip future plannerswith a practical guide toward professionalism.

In this essay, we are concerned with how planning theory hasdefined the role of planners. It is our opinion that planning theoryhas shifted from the view of instrumental rationality, that objectiv-ity in science can improve public decision-making, to a view ofthe profession as one of advocacy. Based on her review of theliterature, Frank (2006) divides planning theory into three areas: “aknowledge-based social model; a design-orientated physical plan-ning approach; and most recently, a radical critique and advocacy”(p. 16). In the engineer-based literature, which we consider thisjournal a part of, the evolution of theory tends to start with “sci-entific efficiency” in the 1800s and end with the rational planningmodel (RPM) (Dzurik and Feldhaus 1986). We do not dispute thistimeline, but it omits the influence of literature from the socialsciences, which attacks the technical role of the planner and arguesfor a more political approach. The influx of critical theory causedplanning theory to take this more activist direction. The influenceof this radical critique is what worries us about contemporaryplanning theory.

Before the 1960s, theory defined the role of planners as tech-nical advisors to their communities (Friedmann 1987). Duringthe 1960s, though, critical theorists began influencing planningtheory. Scholars became more concerned with criticizing societyand the planning profession than with developing practicalplanning models. Critical planning theorists held that instrumentalrationality was inherently flawed and called for plans to be lesstechnical and ambitious. Additionally, the attacks on expert-basedplanning produced theoretical literature that argued for planners to

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protect disadvantaged groups in their communities. In his seminalessay on the role of planners, Davidoff (1965) attacked the planningprofession as being captured by elites, who use the process to denymany groups in a community meaningful input. We do not disputethis argument. We find fault with his solution. Davidoff called forplanners to advocate for groups that they perceived as disadvan-taged. This normative model of planning asks the planner to maketoo many value-based decisions, and it pulls the planner away fromgiving technical advice, the foundation of the profession. Today,planning theory, in many social science outlets, is largely basedon Davidoff’s argument and critical theory’s radical critique.

This influence of critical theory and advocacy planning hasproduced three main weaknesses in theory that hinder planningpractice. First, planning theory is too abstract. Planners are in needof models that help them do their jobs. Current planning theory,with its emphasis on grand normative models, fails to achieve thisgoal. For example, John Forester, a critical planning theorist,described his model, developed in Critical Theory, Public Policy,and Planning Practice (Forester 1993), as an attempt to makeplanning theory less abstract, but a review of the book shows thatForester’s arguments for planning contribute to this problem. Thiscan be seen in the title of chapter 7, which reads, “Toward a CriticalSociology of Public Policy: Probing Policy-shaped Contra-Dictions in the Communicative Infrastructure of Society.” Theoverall theory, like this title, is too abstract for practicing planners.Critical planning theory fails to develop the practical modelslinking the abstract with the concrete, planning practice. Abstractthinking is needed, but there also needs to be linkages within theorybetween these grand ideas and matters of practice. Students ofplanning need theory that will help them understand the nutsand bolts of the profession, communities, and physical design.

Second, theory presents a misguided role for practicingplanners. Advocacy planning promotes a political role for planners.But planners are not politicians. When planners behave as value-based agents, they produce plans like politicians, ones based mostlyon the self-centered interests of client groups, which often are notthe most effective strategies for an entire community. Under thisframework, plans are too political, and the documents are no longerrooted in expert advice. Planners need to be the ones giving electedofficials the advice about what solutions are most efficient, effec-tive, and fair. Advocacy planning does not equip planners with thetools to accomplish this, but rather calls for them to believe similarto elected officials.

Lastly, for planning to work, strategies need to be meaningfuland also realistic. Abstract theory and misguided planning roles donot help communities construct and implement plans. For example,Brody and Highfield (2005) criticized planning research for “Thelack of empirical studies measuring the efficacy of plans and degreeof local plan implementation subsequent to adoption” (p. 159).According to the authors, this “represents one of the greatest gapsin planning research” (p. 159). The lack of research on planimplementation is due, in part, to planning scholarship’s focuson activism. As former practicing planners and current citizenplanners, we have both experienced situations where local officialshave told us that they simply write a plan because state law requiresthem to do so, not because they see the usefulness of the document.By not offering a practical guide, we believe theory contributes tothis problem.

Given planning theory’s failings, we argue for a return to moreskill-reliant, pragmatic, and more professional emphasis amongplanners. Scholars, publishing in this journal, have also calledfor more pragmatic planning theory and demonstrated the efficacyof such theory. For example, Khisty (2000) demonstrated how therational planning model’s efficacy in transportation planning can be

increased through abductive inferencing. Future models should be,like Khisty’s work, grounded in practice. A model that is closer tothe descriptive realities of planning is one that will hold richernormative value for practitioners. But, how should the field returnto its roots? What are the elements, the specifications, of areprofessionalized planning that would serve such an effort? Thechallenge the profession faces is identifying a course of action thatnormal planners can take that enables them to be both effective andin accord with democratic principles.

Specifications for a Reprofessionalized Model ofPlanning

The foundational characteristic is professionalism. By this we meana dispassionate commitment to a body of knowledge and skills thatrequire specialized education and are deployed for the benefit ofothers. There are a number of characteristics we can seek in a modelof planning activities that redirects planning efforts more towardprofessionalism. First, planning activities must follow the principleof comparative advantage. They must do those things that a plannercan do better than any other professional. Planners are trained inmultiple disciplines. Planners can do many things that otherprofessions also do. Planners need to resist this and focus on thoseactivities that only they can do or activities they do better thanothers. The question is not whether planners can do many things.They can. The question is what activities can planners do that,if left to others, will be done less well than if a planner hadaccomplished them.

Second, such activities must constitute the central focus ofplanning’s emphasis. Certainly equity and political consequencesrequire consideration, but the unique contribution of planning doesnot lie in equity and politics but in skills grounded in objectiveanticipation of consequences. We must not confuse legitimateconsideration for primary emphasis.

Another trait that a model of planning activities must display isbeing realistic and flexible. Planners inhabit the world of messiness,confusion, and complexity that characterizes public service.Consequently, planners must place flexibility and adaptability atthe top of essential characteristics. Flexibility’s companion isrealism. Planners exercise varied responsibilities to advance thepublic interest. The test for what planners emphasize should bethose activities that have a concrete consequence. Planners mustdo things that actually work. That is, they must adhere to the testof pragmatism and promote the advancement of the public interest.Conceptual success is of interest; actual success is of importance.Planners must do those activities that actually matter.

The final property by which we may measure any model forplanning is truly the most important. The planner’s activities mustsupport democratic accountability. Planners must do those thingsthat advance constitutionally established responsibilities, and theymust do these in a transparent manner. This means planners mustexert their efforts in service of those activities that highlightavailable alternatives and the courses of action for public decisionmakers.

Such a framework’s application may be illustrated with aconcrete example of a rezoning request to local government. Alarge church sought a rezoning of over an acre of land next tothe sanctuary to expand parking near the central business district.The political influence of the church, through its members, wasconsiderable. In its analysis, the planning department emphasizedpotential unconsidered alternatives and their consequences. Bydirecting the analysis to such additional alternatives, the planningdepartment identified a set of conditions that accommodated the

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church’s interests as well as the concerns of the adjacent neighbor-hood. Staying focused on choices and consequences alloweda professionally based, nonpolitical solution to be obtained.Ironically, this yielded a politically acceptable result that did notrequire a win-lose situation that would have occurred throughthe original politically based approach. This suggests the valueof placing professional skills in a hierarchy of preferred actionsahead of value-driven, political choices.

Model for Planners as Professional Advisors

There are four categories of activities that characterize plannerswho seek to adhere to these specifications. First, planners needto emphasize those activities on which their profession rests:Planning. They must anticipate the consequences of public choices.Such activities as forecasting, policy analysis, and economic andenvironmental planning all rest on consequence analysis. Theunique ability to foresee the implications of a public choice isthe comparative advantage that brings planners legitimacy. To besure, there are other skills planners rely on because the settingsplanners work in are yeasty and complex. But the promise ofanticipating what might happen should a course of action be takenis the raison d’etre of planning. Planners need to accompany thiswith informed humility. Planners cannot predict the future, butthey can indicate potential or likely consequences based on theirprofessional training and experience.

A second feature of planning activities concerns successfullymanaging deliberative processes. Sometimes planners have nohope of employing their comparative advantage of anticipatingconsequences without a venue in which to present this anticipation.This means planners must be able to Facilitate. This facilitationmay take place in public meetings, with developers, with fellowgovernment employees, with elected officials, but the emphasisis operating a decision process that is timely and leads tostakeholder inclusion and contribution. Planners must possessthe facilitative skills of managing a decision process in multiplesettings.

Planners also must be able to get work done through others.They need to be able to Manage. This concerns multipledimensions. First, planners must be able to manage themselves,their time, their choice of workflows, and their emotions. Almostany issue worthy of planners’ attention is controversial. There islikely a considerable amount of conflict and emotion. Plannersmust be able to manage themselves in such a setting so that theystay on task and achieve actual results, as pragmatism wouldrequire. Planners also must know how to mobilize others toadvance the public interest. Of course, this will include those ina supervisory relationship; however, in today’s networked world,much of success depends on the cooperation of those over whomno supervision control exists. Whether it is staff from public works,city attorney, public interest groups, or developers, a plannermust successfully manage relationships so that they voluntarilycollaborate with the planner by recognizing it is in their self-interestto do so. Planners must be able to manage multiple challenges,people, and interests simultaneously.

The last activity that planners must accomplish is that they mustintegrate all of the preceding activities. They must Synthesize. Thiscan be the most challenging and the most creative aspect ofplanning. Given the settings in which planners work and thechangeable nature of these settings, no recipe for success exists.On a daily basis, planners must devise and revise the combinationof the preceding activities. They must do so as they anticipate theexternal requirements, the skills they and their staff possess, the

interests of the multiple players in the development game, andthe ongoing challenge to do this in a manner that advancesdemocratic accountability. The public interest is the ultimatemeasure of planning’s success, and the ability to combine plan-ning’s multiple activities in a manner that advances the public in-terest just so, can make planning not only worthwhile from thepublic’s standpoint, but creative from the planner’s viewpoint.

Specific Skills to Animate the Model

The preceding model is conceptual. What specific skills mightplanners seek to cultivate with themselves to animate this model?

A primary skill that planners need is the ability to anticipate andcommunicate the consequences of courses of action. This is theunique skill that planners bring to public choices. It is built bothon training and experience. It requires the ability to anticipatethe consequences of development patterns. These consequencesmay be of an economic, environmental, or social nature. These con-sequences must take into account the legal constraints concerningadherence to due process and restrictions of taking of private prop-erty by the government. In addition, this skill requires considerationof the complexity that may result from consequences that involvethe interaction of economic, environmental, legal, and socialfeatures of a development. Yet it is not enough for planners to beable to anticipate such consequences. Their professional respon-sibilities to assist decision makers require that they communicatethese consequences in ways that convey to the decision makersand the citizenry the relevant consequences of potential choices.Verbal, written and graphic skills all must be brought to bear tocommunicate the anticipated consequences.

An extension of such communication skills is the facility toemploy group processes, which draw the appropriate communitiesto consider consequences of public decisions. This suggestsplanners must have the political skills to know who constitutesthe relevant actors in a particular setting. This may range fromdepartment heads in a city government to elected officials tocommunity interest groups or all of these simultaneously in ashifting matrix. And it requires planners to be able to conductbrainstorming and charrette sessions that assemble and organizethe collective wisdom of multiple interest groups.

Planners either work in or for governments, so they need to beable to manage accordingly. This suggests the ability to organizework is important, both for themselves and others in their charge.Scheduling and planning work is crucial for planners’ success be-cause complex projects, which often are those planners work on,are ones that require the combined efforts of a number of individ-uals. The techniques for controlling activities so that anticipatedwork gets done on time and with the allocated resources are alsopart of this activity. In short, planners need to be able to managepeople.

The last skill planners need to animate this model of reprofes-sionalization is the skill of integration, the skill of seeing and actingon the whole rather than pieces of a situation. First, planners needthe ability to identify complex circumstances and the features thathave led to this complexity. Planners need the flexibility that stemsfrom constant assessment and adjustment of emerging project con-ditions. This implies both a temperament that tolerates ambiguityand the ability to identify and adjust the definition of clients and tocommunicate, when appropriate, such alterations.

In short, the ability to integrate depends on planners to thinkroutinely in terms of alternatives, both related to the projects underconsideration and the political interests at play in such projects. Todo this, planners need an exceptionally well-developed persistence,

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because barriers are likely to be a routine feature of projects. Andfinally, the ability to integrate depends on planners’ unflinchinghonesty about who the client is, what constitutes success, andthe consequences of projects as they relate to such success.

Conclusion

We are aware that many readers of this journal will react toour essay by saying, “Yeah, so what?” But based on the aca-demic experience of these two planners—one with substantialexperience as a practitioner—the scholarly literature definingthe role of planners has ventured so far from key principles thattheory is no longer providing effective guidance to practitioners.Advocacy planning and other critical theories are influentialwithin the halls of academia; if change is going to occur withinthese halls, we believe that practicing planners and scholars, read-ing journals like this one, will have to demand it. Planning theoryshould describe the role of the planner as a professional advisor,not an advocate. Doing so will help remove an emphasis onadvocacy and reprofessionalize planning. We, therefore, believethe basic principles in our model must be stated clearly again inthe pages of this journal to spark a discussion among planners,engineers, and scholars regarding the future of planning practice.

Our hope is that this essay will contribute to the literature bystarting this discussion. It is a type of critical evaluation that isneeded to protect the role of the planner as a technical advisorto government.

References

Brody, S. D., and Highfield, W. E. (2005). “Does planning work?: Testingthe implementation of local environmental planning in Florida.” J. Am.Plann. Assoc., 71(2), 159–175.

Davidoff, P. (1965). “Advocacy and pluralism in planning.” J. Am. Inst.Plann., 31(4), 331–338.

Dzurik, A. A., and Feldhaus, R. L. (1986). “Evolution of planning theoryand practice: Engineering implications.” J. Urban Plann. Dev., 10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9488(1986)112:2(37), 37–45.

Forester, J. (1993). Critical theory, public policy, and planning practice:Toward a critical pragmatism, SUNY Press, Albany, NY.

Frank, A. I. (2006). “Three decades of thought on planning education.”J. Plann. Lit., 21(1), 15–67.

Friedmann, J. (1987). Planning in the public domain: From knowledge toaction, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Khisty, J. C. (2000). “Can wicked problems be tackled through abductiveinferencing?” J. Urban Plann. Dev., 10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9488(2000)126:3(104), 104–119.

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