The Profession of City Planning

Changes, Images, and Challenges: 1950-200

Lloyd Rodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351476133
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Business

In thirty-four provocative and insightful chapters, the nation's leading planners present a definitive assessment of fifty years of city planning and establish a benchmark for the profession for the next fifty years. The book appraises what planners do and how well they do it, how and why their current activities differ from past practices, and how much and in what ways planners have or have not enhanced the quality of urban life and contributed to the intellectual capital of the field.How have the goals, values, and practices of planners changed? What do planners say about their roles and the problems they confront? What is the relevance of their skills, from design capabilities and environmental savvy to intermediate and long-term perspectives and the pragmatics of implementation? The contributors seeking to answer these questions include Anthony Downs, Nathan Glazer, Philip B. Herr, Judith E. Innes, Terry S. Szold, Lawrence J. Vale, and Sam Bass Warner, Jr.The Profession of City Planning contrasts with the main changes in the US over the second half of the twentieth century in city planning. Sector images of the practice and effects of planning on housing, transportation, and the environment, as well as the development of economic tools are also discussed.

Part I

OVERVIEW

1

Images and Paths of Change in Economics,
Political Science, Philosophy, Literature, and
City Planning: 1950-2000

LLOYD RODWIN

Professions change. Not just in their ideas, tools and capabilities, or the problems they address and the services they render, but in the controver­ sies that divide them, as well as the images others have of them or they have of themselves. In this book, we propose to examine these issues and changes in city planning practice. By way of context, we will first scan the changes and issues that have occurred over the past half-century in several other fields. We are in a particularly good position to do so because (as noted in the Preface) Daedalus, in its Winter 1997 issue, reviewed the changes and issues that have occurred during this period in the fields of economics, political science, phi­ losophy, and literature. Leading figures in these fields depict some of the broader forces influencing the universities, as well as a portion of the American pro­ fessional culture involved in this transformation.

In venturing this resume, three assumptions have been made: that the fields examined are more or less “professionalized”; that the Daedalus histori­ cal evaluations are reasonably accurate; and that there are common items in each of these fields that have not been sufficiently highlighted. These are the service functions, the role of research or scholarship (intellectual capital for­ mation), and the ways of thinking in each of the fields about values in relation to professional behavior.

THE DAEDALUS STUDIES

ECONOMICS

Turning now to the investigations, all report a common denominator: that the fields are rife with controversy. However, theoretical economists such as Robert M. Solow and David M. Kreps affirm a substantial consensus on methodology. They say a large part of the economics profession has opted for rigor over realism. To achieve this rigor, they devise models based on simpli­ fying assumptions explored deductively, most of them designed to interpret data or to be tested by data. Using mathematical and econometric tools, economists take great pride in their quantitative approach. In the process, they have dropped or downplayed institutional subject matter and history, along with narrative and oral skills. These economists acknowledge that the literature in the field has become narrow and technical while calling atten­ tion to their “common methodological ‘tongue’” and the reduction of “dia­ lects” in their specialized subfields (Kreps 1997, 65—73). The bulk of the profession is still loathe to abandon its emphasis on general equilibrium theory or optimization studies. Keenly aware of the price paid to achieve this rigor, some are now trying to broaden their “canonical” assumptions and, hope­ fully, the relevance of their disciplines to the real world (Solow 1997).

The metaphor of the hourglass—Solow, Kreps, and others suggest— describes the path they have been forced, or deliberately chosen, to pursue: a drastic narrowing for a quarter of a century or more of the focus of the field, until the power and insights of their studies could increase and permit more flexibility. Now, many departments have added courses (for example, eco­ nomic development and the economics of the environment), treating both market failures and successes. They make a greater effort to broaden assump­ tions, add and evaluate historical perspectives and data, and interact more frequently with specialists in law, psychology, sociology, and history. Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in the work of the political and social economist Albert Hirschman; and Paul Krugman even suggests it would be fruitful to place greater emphasis on regions and cities. As yet, however, only a tiny minority of economists worry about issues of race, power, and the interests served by their colleagues. The latter are not even mentioned in the investigations discussed in Daedalus.

To many outsiders, both the rigor of, and the quest for, increased flex­ ibility is admirable; but skeptics are legion. Whether the latter are right or wrong, issues are persistently raised about the price already paid. Graduate economics programs, it is reported, “are no longer attracting and retaining the ablest students from strong undergraduate programs”; even more that “economics, as presented at the graduate level, has become increasingly ill suited to the preparation of future members of the economics faculties in the undergraduate liberal arts setting” (Barber 1997, 96). A study by Oberlin College, in which nine liberal arts colleges participated, indicated:

For the bulk of the twentieth century, the selective liberal arts colleges have nurtured notable recruits to the profession, on a scale dispropor­ tionate to their size. By the later 1980s it was abundantly clear that that historic pattern no longer held. A study orchestrated at Oberlin College (in which nine of the country’s most selective liberal arts colleges par­ ticipated) indicated that the decade of the 1980s had witnessed a re­ duction in the flow of their graduates to Ph.D. programs in economics to merely 50 to 60 percent of the rate to which they had formerly been accustomed, despite the fact that the number of undergraduates major­ ing in economics at these institutions had grown considerably—most students come away from their experience in liberal arts colleges per­ suaded that economic analysis had payoffs in heightening the rationality of practical decision making, that it had relevance for public policy, and that it offered useful insights into the workings of an economy’s institu­ tions. . . . Those dimensions of “reality,” however, were largely squeezed out of the standard first two years of graduate study. . . . The result was disaffection on the part of some promising talents. (Barber 1997, p. 97)

Then, too, there is a lot of brooding over the neglect of the service functions of economists: grumbling “about turning out idiot savants, skilled in technique, not with ‘real world problem solving’” (Barber 1997, 98), plus protests on this score from general practitioners, business leaders, consulting firms, top educators, and administrative leaders of colleges; and from senior econo­ mists like Kenneth Arrow, established officers of the American Economics Association, dissident economists like Kenneth Galbraith, Raymond Vernon, and Albert Hirschman, not to mention faculty colleagues in other university fields, such as engineering, the sciences, and undergraduate faculty, requiring service inputs from their economics colleagues.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

So much for economics, regarded in many quarters as the most ad­ vanced of the social sciences. Let us turn now to Charles E. Lindblom’s re­ port about the situation in political science. At the outset, Lindblom—one of the more provocative and innovative figures in current political science— emphasizes that he is reporting, not lamenting, the characteristics of the field. Political science, he says, cannot compare with economics, let alone the sci­ ences, either in new ideas or discoveries. Most of the advances in ideas (for example, information theory, game theory, structuralism, and systems analy­ sis) come from other fields, such as economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology and from specialists in other realms, such as Claude Shannon, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Burrhus Frederic (B. F.) Skinner, and Norbert Wiener. There is no clear focus, Lindblom believes, on what to study; nor are there technical questions, as there are in science, that indisputably have to be solved before moving ahead to the next stage—as, for example, space exploration requiring work in physics or the control of communicable disease first requiring work in biology. At best, Lindblom suggests, studies in political science expand, refine, and correct subject matter, which, in the main, comes from lay thought: which is why, perhaps, there are few, if any, great discoveries or surprises (Lindblom 1997).

Also, if you do not discover and make findings, Lindblom asks, what does the field really do? Well, he suggests, it spends a lot of time “trying,” but not very fruitfully. Political science also does a lot of historical studies— reporting, analyses, exploring new subject matter—while indulging in a great deal of inconclusive debate on a wide variety of themes, all of which provides much data, contextual information, empirical test of hypotheses, improve­ ment of methodology, correction of previous views or errors, and sometimes perceptive evaluations of situations, variables, and various forms of political activity and behavior. Yet, in summing up, he concludes that very little done by specialists in political science—or for that matter, in any other branch of social science—can be shown to have been either unarguably or demonstra­ bly necessary” (Lindblom 1997, 241).

In effect, Lindblom concludes that the significant findings or discover­ ies in political science (because of the subject matter and the limitations of existing tools) leave a great deal to be desired, however useful the more con­ ventional activities and services of the profession are or have been in shaping and refining our thinking and general knowledge. A case in point he cites is the increasing interest in and development of teaching programs in the cur­ rently fashionable field of policy analysis, instead of public administration, with, as yet, no serious capability of coping effectively with the diverse, com­ plex political variables that shape the more important of these decisions.

Lindblom and his colleague Roger M. Smith do note a bias among prac­ titioners in the field toward helping democracy function, as well as efforts on behalf of racial, gender and immigration reform, activities with which he is in sympathy but which, he notes, produce explosive reactions in quarters less sympathetic to these views and which raise questions about the objectivity or adequacy of these investigations. He does, however, suggest a role (shall we call it a service role?) that the political as well as some other social scientists might reasonably pursue—a subject that “many laypeople care about but lack the skills to explore” (Roger M. Smith citing Lindblom 1997, 275—78): this would be the systematic identification and analysis of such serious social problems as equity and income distribution, which are distorted by dispro­ portionate power or income, or structural and institutional defects. Perhaps by serving as intellectual gadflies, they might help redress the balance.

PHILOSOPHY

As is true of economics, the quest for clarity and rigor transformed the pre—World War II perspectives in philosophy. Perhaps the most influential voice then in the United States was John Dewey. Dewey’s sense of philosophy and that of his followers—“essentially a public enterprise . . . directly in­ volved in the formulation and solution of large-scale practical problems” (Nehemas 1997, 210)—was challenged by the analytical reformers: in the main, logical positivists who “held that all meaningful statements are either (1) verifiable statements about sense data or (2) analytic statements, such as the statements of logic and mathematics” (Putnam 1997). W V Quine, an eminent philosopher, even argued “that philosophy was continuous with sci­ ence, a more abstract and general version of the natural investigation of the world” (Nehemas 1997, 214).

As in economics, many traditional subjects that did not meet these cri­ teria were dropped: history, for example, and metaphysics and ethics. Over time, of course, the ideas of the analytical reformers were modified, and new fields and subject matter surfaced. Some examples are Noam Chomsky’s ex­ plorations of language, work in cognitive science (now one of the most clearly interdisciplinary specialties within philosophy), and work on computational states or processes. Also, with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, philosophy reentered “the public normative arena,” with some joint efforts beginning to emerge in law, medicine, social science, and business. Even more intriguing, feminism introduced some of the ideas of Continental philosophy, work previously considered “paradigms of sloppy, disorganized and pretentious thought” (Nehemas 1997, 218). Stanley Cavell once face­ tiously observed that “Continental philosophers write as if they have read every philosophical work produced thus far, while analytical philosophers write as if they have read nothing” (Nehemas 1997, 219). Today, however, analytical philosophy is reported to be interested in the history of the disci­ pline, and some philosophers “are even beginning to look at analytical phi­ losophy itself as a historically situated movement, not simply as the revolu­ tion that for the first time stood philosophy right side up” (Nehemas 1997, 219).

The gulfs and conflicts, however, remain deep-seated. The situation is described as “calm, peaceful and rather detached,” although there were at­ tempts by groups opposed to analytical philosophy to take over the offices of the American Philosophical Association. Nonetheless, there is “a dangerous fragmentation in the field, with people who teach together in the same de­ partment having neither any idea of what their colleagues are doing, nor any interest in finding out” (Nehemas 1997, 251).

There is also said to be no canon today, no common ground, no set of works

that members of a discipline would be ashamed to admit they have not read ... and expected to have a view about them . . . and sometimes become almost enthusiastic about—no rudimentary set of problems common to the discipline, problems that even if not all philosophers consider them to be their own, they might believe will make their problems more tractable when they are resolved. (Nehemas 1997, 221-22)

The discipline is now “in a holding pattern, lacking a clear overall direction and an explicit sense of unity and mission.”

A philosophy with a public—not a popular—voice can preserve some of the substantive concerns as well as some of the formal virtues of clarity and rigor that characterized analytical philosophy at its best. But it can also be an engaged and consequential enterprise envisaged by the American pragmatists as well as by most of the great figures in its his­ tory. (Nehemas 1997, 223)

LITERATURE

If we now shift our attention to the field of literature, it becomes quickly apparent that the changes here are more radical and the controversies even more intractable than the other three fields. M. H. Abrams ironically ob­ serves that

literary departments, which had hitherto represented themselves as the chief conservators, interpreters and propagators of the humanistic tra­ dition and of the writings Mathew Arnold represented as “the best that has been thought and said” have become the major source of radical challenges both to the tradition and the inherited literary canon. (Abrams 1997,116)

Sharp challenges, of course, are not novel in this field. Catherine Gallagher reports that the various histories now available say that “literature professors have always disagreed over the fundamental principles of their profession, always engaged in theory wars, always been prompted by extra literary con­ cerns . . . ” (Gallagher 1997, 133). A leading example has been the shift from a pre—World War I focus on language and history to literature and a redirec­ tion of skill from scholarship to criticism.

John Crow Ransom persuaded the profession that the usefulness and justification of the departments of literature depended on their establishing service roles which they and only they could perform. The task of these roles— literary criticism and analysis of literary techniques—was to serve the writ­ ers of contemporary literature and the reading public at large (Ransom cited by Gallagher 1997, 137).

Close reading of the text was the new shibboleth. It “marginalized all studies of biographical, social and historical conditions and aspects of the [work]” (Abrams 1997, 108). This approach—still popular, though some­ what deprecated today as formalism—was quite influential. Indeed, it has been picked up “by the New Critics—including the American deconstructive critics whose “closer reading” (in Paul de Man’s term) shared the ahistorical formalism of their predecessors but replaced their disposition to discover coherence and a paradoxical unity of opposing meanings with a predisposi­ tion to discover incoherencies, “ruptures,” and the undecidable gridlock of opposing meanings called “apori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Overview
• Part II. Images Of City-Planning Practice Collage
• Part III. Images Of City-Planning Practice Sectors
• Part IV. The Public Image And The Leadership Role Of The Profession
• Part V. What About The Future?
• Appendices
• Index