Reflective Planning Practice

Theory, Cases, and Methods

Richard Willson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000200140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Reflective Planning Practice: Theory, Cases, and Methods uses structured, first-person reflection to reveal the artistry of planning practice. The value of professional reflection is widely recognized, but there is a difference between acknowledging it and doing it. This book takes up that challenge, providing planners' reflections on past practice as well as prompts for reflecting in the midst of planning episodes. It explains a reflection framework and employs it in seven case studies written by planning educators who also practice. The cases reveal practical judgments made during the planning episode and takeaways for practice, as the planners used logic and emotion, and applied convention and invention. The practical judgments are explained from the perspective of the authors' personal experiences, purposes, and professional style, and their interpretation of the rich context that underpins the cases including theories, sociopolitical aspects, workplace setting, and roles. The book seeks to awaken students and practitioners to the opportunities of a pragmatic, reflective approach to planning practice.

Chapter 1

A Roadmap for Reflective Practice

Effective city planners build reflection into their practice. More than just looking in the mirror, reflection is a dynamic activity that involves looking through and around the mirror at context factors and the interplay of thought, emotion, and action. Planners reflect-on-action in examining past actions for insight, and they reflect-in-action to support practical judgments in the midst of planning episodes. This book helps you develop a roadmap for reflective practice.

Reflective practice is widely acknowledged in the professions, but there is gap between acknowledging it and doing it. This book takes up that challenge, offering a reflection framework, reflection-on-action case studies, and prompts and ideas for incorporating reflection in daily practice. Reflection mills discrete experiences into practical wisdom that is needed in the dynamic context of planning.

My emphasis on reflection has two origins. The first source is my direct experience of the benefits of reflection during a hybrid career as a professor and a practicing planner. Reflection helps me clarify my personal values in relation to the profession, increases my ability to understand and influence context, enhances my collaborative capacity, and improves the quality of my practical judgments. The second source is scholarship that supports this approach, including Donald Schön’s seminal work (1983), that has continued in academic and professional interest in reflection, emotions in planning, and mindfulness (Baum 2015, Ferreira 2013, Fischler 2012, Hoch 2006, Lyles and Swearingen White 2019, Osborne and Grant-Smith 2015, Willson 2018).

Reflection is essential because of planning’s complex socioeconomic and political context, its demand for ethical reasoning, and its multidisciplinary nature. While all professions benefit from reflective practice, allied professions such as architecture or engineering tend to have more clearly defined aims, techniques, and clients. Said simply, planning does not allow for a straightforward application of technique – it requires practical judgments about how to proceed, what knowledge to employ, and whose interests to serve. The cyclists on the front cover are a useful analogy for planning practice: attention to the long view is required, there are choices of paths, and balancing requires sensing and reacting, moment by moment.

Reflection helps planners navigate the space between theory and practice. In a recent review of theory-practice tensions, Forester (2019) identifies four generations: (i) theory responses to wicked problems, (ii) the emergence of argumentative planning, (iii) attention to meditated multi-stakeholder negotiations, and (iv) consideration of the moral infrastructure of deliberation. Of the current moment, he argues the following: “The pragmatic imperative to act in fluid, complex, and contested settings requires creative and practically situated improvisation” (Forester 2019, 1). This last generation demands that planners reflect and learn from others.

The book is also motivated by my love of a profession that has design, economic, social, and environmental betterment as goals. Over 40 years of practice, I find planning to be an enterprise worthy of devotion, and an antidote to despair, alienation, and cynicism. As my friend Paul Niebanck says, “Planning is interesting, exciting, complex, messy yet orderly, humble yet powerful, challenging yet fun, and worthy of investing oneself in” (personal email communication, September 26, 2019). In the face of local and global challenges such as climate change or poverty, planning is something we can do.

The framework for reflection offered here includes elements of planner-as-person, emphasizing individual values, aims, and ways of working, and assessment of context. My practice experience in transportation, land use, and environmental planning is a part of a broad diversity of activities that makes it difficult to pin down a definition of planning. Urban and regional planners make plans, design built form, regulate development, program infrastructure, solve problems, develop and implement programs, organize and empower communities, and conduct many other tasks. The profession’s topics of concern include those just mentioned, plus economic and community development, equity and social justice, housing, public health and human services, and urban design/placemaking. To address this variety, the book’s core method is seven case studies written by me and four other planners who share their understanding of past planning episodes. Their voices are joined by commentaries from other practitioners and scholars.

Case Studies as a Method for Understanding Practice

As an academic who also practices planning, I observe that planning education and professional conferences seldom explain how things really work. Rather than “looking in” on planning from a detached academic perspective, the book’s case accounts are experiential and explained from the inside out, recognizing the inherently personal dimension of planning practice.

Fischler (2012) describes reflective practice as “a form of professional activity in which the practitioner assesses her own experience critically and submits it to the scrutiny of others” (314). In the cases, each planner assesses their own experience; the scrutiny of others is achieved through text box commentaries and by inviting the reader to consider and critique the account.

Case studies offer richness of detail, specifics, and grounding that is essential to understand practice. The moment a planning conversation moves from a theory to a case, all the contingencies of planning action are introduced, including shifting context; the relevance of many theories and forms of knowledge; and the planner’s habits, aims, and many ways of working. Cases come to life when they reveal how the planners synthesize the multiple elements of planning and make critical practical judgments about how to proceed.

My approach is appreciative of previous reflective accounts of planning such as Making City Planning Work (Jacobs 1980), Making Equity Planning Work (Krumholz and Forester 1990), Advancing Equity Planning Now (Krumholz and Wertheim Hexter 2018), and case-building efforts by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The book provides first-person accounts because two planners in the same situation will practice differently – using acquired habits and intuition, acting out of their own values, reading context, applying knowledge and skills, operating consciously and unconsciously, and drawing on experience. This is why the writers of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) professional certification examination questions are challenged to determine the correct answers to planning scenario questions. The exigencies and conflicting perspectives of practice call for improvisation, intuition, and collaboration.

The cases address mainstream and equity planning, public sector, consulting, and nonprofit settings, and a range of places. They vary from famous (the Miami 21 form-based code) to seemingly mundane (an entitlement decision on a single project in Hawthorne, California). Case writers, and those who provide commentaries, offer a diverse set of voices.

Show-and-tell was a feature in my grade-school education. Students brought a favorite object to class, showed it to their classmates, and talked about their relationship to it. The difference between show and tell distinguishes this book from research that tells by arguing for particular procedural theories of planning, asserting certain causal relationships that draw on substantive theories in planning, or claiming particular planning solutions based on various forms of evaluation. Instead, the book shows what the case authors thought, felt and did in the hope that these reflections will help other planners consider and improve their practice.

A Framework for Reflecting on Practice

The case studies are reflection-on-action – authors consider what they thought, felt, and did in hindsight. Reflection-on-action is not just history for its own sake, however, as it provides insights for reflection-in-action in the midst of future planning episodes. The cases show how practitioners made decisions about how to proceed in a diverse set of planning contexts.¹

Planner’s actions are framed by their personal commitments and identities, hence the planner-as-person component. The approach is reflexive in that case authors are self-referential, seeking to understand and reveal their position as an individual planner and person.² Practices are shaped by personal values, and wide-ranging formal and informal theories about human nature and change processes, as well as past experiences. Intuition, habit, and unconscious factors shape the synthesis of these factors in action.

The context element acknowledges that planners act within economic, market, political, administrative, and cultural frameworks that are broader than the particulars of the planning episode. Further, their actions are shaped by values they have adopted as members of a profession. Planning, therefore, takes place in a tension between human agency (planner-as-person) and structure (context). Planners don’t respond to this framework passively, though, because they influence context through their work. For example, a planner’s refusal to participate in or reproduce discourse that demonizes a particular group of people, and/or their resistance to it, may influence politics by delegitimizing that discourse, encouraging others to speak up, and therefore changing context.

The planning episode occurs in the space between planner-as-person and context. It is an assignment that leads to the development of a plan, policy, or program; recommends a decision; or implements a plan or program. During the episode, planners think, feel, and act in ways that transcend single theories or practice prescriptions, so the interpretive lens used here uses two pairs of elements: logic and emotion, and the application of convention and invention. Logic is a core commitment of the profession: planners use it in developing knowledge that supports decisions, clarifing relationships between ends and means, and designing implementation mechanisms. Yet logic alone is insufficient. Emotion is a profound dimension for the planner and for those engaged in the planning episode. Engaging both logic and emotion, planners act. Regarding convention and invention, one form of action is shaping outcomes so they meet community norms, best practice, research findings, or the guidance contained in plans. In this work, planners identify and apply conventions. Other times, planners solve problems in novel ways, facilitate new visions, create plans or programs, or disrupt the status quo. This is the invention aspect of practice. Often, planners apply conventions and invent at the same time.

Figure 1.1 provides a visual representation of the framework, which is shown in more detail in Chapter 5, Figure 5.2. While planners may well find a different or modified framework is useful for reflecting on their practice, my purpose is to support structured reflection, improve practice discussion among planners, and support comparisons of approaches. The framework is a tool intended to be used, modified, and transformed.

Figure 1.1 Reflection Framework

This book emphasizes individual reflection because that is the starting point in interacting with ...