 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
What Should A Planner Know? [An abridged version of this article was Mark Hornell, MCIP Email: mhornell@crd.bc.ca Tel: 250.360.3244 "The constant education of the senses is the elemental groundwork of all higher forms of education." - Lewis Mumford
What should a planner know? As the May/June 1999 issue of PlanCanada revealed, in these uncertain times of dramatic social, economic and environmental change, the answer is by no means clear. The traditional view that planning is primarily a government activity concerned with the application of instrumental rationality to the problems of societal guidance, has come into increasing question. Although thirty years of criticism of planning’s traditional methods, assumptions, purposes and actions have enriched the field with a wide array of new practices and perspectives, recent theoretical discussions loosely captured by the term postmodernism, call into question the possibility of any kind of planning that claims to legitimately speak to and articulate an inclusive common interest. In this context, reflecting on the question of what a planner should know takes on real urgency as the profession re-thinks its proper domain, role and practices in processes of ongoing societal change. For PIBCs Education Committee, even putting aside these larger theoretical concerns, what a planner should know is a basic question and a practical problem, the answer (or answers) to which can help us define an appropriate role for PIBC in providing continuing professional development opportunities to the membership. This article will briefly touch on just a sample of the extensive literature in planning education, and offer some personal perspectives from members of the Education Committee on what a planner should know, as a point of departure for further dialogue with the membership. The Problem of Continuing Professional Development Continuing professional development is a problem for PIBC for several reasons. Most professions have some minimum expectation that members will maintain and enhance their knowledge and skill set as a condition of continued membership in the professional body (CIP has a voluntary program). Furthermore, planners perceive that in a world of ongoing change simple survival in a competitive job market demands constant knowledge and skill enhancement. Demand from the membership is therefore strong for ongoing professional education opportunities that provide practical skills to improve job performance, as well as the opportunity to consider the bigger picture of emerging knowledge and theoretical debate that deepens understanding of the evolving planning context. These demands challenge a small organization like PIBC to find the right focus for limited time and money. In terms of service provision, should PIBC directly sponsor courses on fundamental or topical areas on a regular basis; should we act more like a clearing house for information on the broad array of relevant course offerings available in BC and outside the province; or should we act as a broker putting members together with contract educators on topics of specific interest? Although the Education Committee has yet to come to any firm conclusions on the right course of action, a discussion that hinges on finding a sharp and strategic focus for scarce resources, quickly leads to our basic question on content. The Official Version An official answer to the question of what a planner should know is found in Volume 3 of the CIP Membership Manual (1995), which sets out minimum content guidelines for university planning programs. Planning is briefly defined as a future-oriented, comprehensive process, that seeks to link knowledge and action in ways "which improve the quality of public and private development and of decisions affecting people and their environment." The definition also speaks to the need to reconcile present realities to future states, and of a planner’s need of a comprehensive understanding of communities and regions and of the theory and practice of planning as a discipline. Furthermore, planners must be sensitive to the ways in which planning affects individual and community values, and understand their own roles in this process, if they are to be effective and ethical practitioners. With regard to basic knowledge, and just sticking to main subject headings, planners need to know about:
With regard to core skills, planners need:
Finally, the importance of educating planners to become ethical practitioners is emphasized, in particular, through an understanding of the importance and effect of the CIPs Statement of Values. The point of this article is not to critique the official CIP view of core planning knowledge. But it is fair to say that the CIPs membership manual describes a specific kind of planning that could be summarized as:
A question comes to mind from this quick review: Does it make sense to relate PIBCs continuing professional development efforts back to the CIPs core list of planning knowledge; or are there other areas on which we should focus, either underplayed or not covered in the official version of what a planner needs to know, more relevant to the challenges planners face in actual practice? Knowing and Doing Thinking about what a planner should know leads immediately to considerations of what a planner should do. Education Committee Chair Deborah Sargent points out, that any knowing about doing has to include knowing what not to do and when to leave well enough alone. It’s also a matter of delimiting planning’s field of action or domain of practice. A view that has become predominant over the past thirty years, conceives of planning as a kind of general methodology to be applied to any range of policy domains at any scale. This is clearly reflected in John Friedmann’s (1987) stripped down definition of planning as simply "knowledge applied to action", where similar concepts, processes and methods of analysis can be applied to a wide range of policy areas, from traditional concerns with human settlements to those more narrowly focused on resource management, environmental protection, human health and social well-being, economic development and many others. Dramatic changes in the job market have also caused practicing planners to be flexible and opportunistic, applying their knowledge and skills to areas often far removed from traditional concerns with urban land use and development processes. In this sense, as Deborah Sargent notes, knowing how to facilitate change generally is at the core of much current planning practice, a conception of planning and the planner’s role discernible in recent legislation such as BCs Growth Strategies Act, as well as in the current preoccupation with methods of alternative dispute resolution. Hans Blumenfeld was an early critic of this trend in planning, arguing that there is no such thing as a planner per se, but rather a variety of kinds of planning and planners. Planning is common in virtually every sphere of modern life, and is undertaken in every sector, both public and private, of social and economic practice. Everybody plans: it is having knowledge and skills appropriate to an identified domain of practice – health planning, environmental planning, financial planning, social planning, urban planning, etc. – that distinguishes the informed amateur from someone asserting professional planning competence. Seen in this light, a downside to the current generalized conception of planning is that planners trained in the past twenty or thirty years, are poorly equipped for the traditional work of planning for human settlements. In gaining flexible skills of general application, planners have to a large extent sacrificed their traditional domain of practice. This is a problem since, after all, it is for this expertise that citizens typically turn to planners, who then frequently have to turn to specialists in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, engineering and real estate for the knowledge and skills that were traditionally their own. On the other hand, it may be that professional insecurity is inherent to planning and the sign of a healthy practioner. Committee member Don Alexander suggests strongly that planners need the humility to realize what they don’t know, and to recognize the limitations of their own knowledge and point of view, particularly with respect to knowledge and ability in the community at large. Blumenfeld (1972) illuminated this concern from a different perspective, when he described urban planners as "universal dilettantes", the generalist and synthesising environmental design discipline that can never hope to master the entire field, but stands in the privileged position of helping to bring the disparate – and often specialist - contributions of many others into some kind of coherent whole that is more than the sum of the parts. Postmodern critics have called into question the very foundations of planning’s knowing and doing, and the model of professional practice in the public interest still evident in the preceding discussion. Most recently and eloquently summarized by Australian planning educator Leonie Sandercock (1998, 1999), postmodern criticism finds that planning is not a value-neutral application of technical expertise, but embedded in relations of political and economic power, endeavouring to impose some set of values (generally those of the dominant society) over others. Planning’s claims to comprehensiveness, rationality, a longer view perspective on the public interest, and a preponderant reliance on quantitative modelling and analysis over other modes of knowledge have, she argues, worked in pursuit of a socially homogenizing project aimed at effacing local particularity, history, and the reality of multiple contending interests in society. Sandercock asserts that in an increasingly multicultural world (her thoughts on the implications of aboriginal land claims are relevant to Canada), where civic activism on behalf of particular interests and identities is leading to greater demands for open and participatory decision making, the old model of planning no longer meets our needs and may have become largely irrelevant. What is needed now is a postmodern planning that accepts its limitations, embraces contingency and multiplicity in society, and dedicates itself to an emancipatory, people-centred project focused on empowerment. Knowledge/Skills or Literacies? This article is not the place to resolve the theoretical questions raised by Sandercock and others. For those interested in this debate, rejoinders to Sandercock are provided by PIBC members Dave Witty and John Curry in the May/June 1999 PlanCanada. Nevertheless these ongoing theoretical discussions have practical implications as we try to define an appropriate PIBC response to continuing professional development. Sandercock (1998) finds the distinction between knowledge and skills limiting, suggesting that it leads to specialization in a continually outmoded set of skills, and a concomitant loss of focus on questions of meaning and value, preventing a truly interdisciplinary understanding and practice from emerging. She suggests that wherever we work as planners, we need to understand and focus on:
By focusing on a firm domain of knowledge and practice, by developing fluency in a richer body of knowledge and skill, and by re-dedicating our professional lives to a project of ethical inquiry and practice, Sandercock believes we can enter the twenty-first century inspired and prepared to meet its challenges. Harvey Perloff (1980) drew different conclusions from criticism of the traditional modern planning model. Rather than shifting attention to civil society and group empowerment, he proposed a strategic model of government planning focused on alternative futures and coordinated implementation and management of change. For Perloff, an official land-use plan for a city as a whole is no longer an appropriate integrating element, but simply one of several tools used to achieve more ultimate goals. In his view, urban planning is best understood as the processes through which municipal development decisions are made and carried out. Its purpose is to try to guide the decisions and actions within a given sphere of power and policy toward agreed upon goals and as such, inevitably imposes certain values on the future. For urban planning to be effective in this conception, it must have the capacity and the authority to deal with the economic, the social, the broad environmental, and the political/governmental sectors of urban development. In Perloff’s model, planners need broad substantive knowledge of the workings of the urban system, and mastery of three inter-related skill sets:
In this model, planners are active agents of change in urban governance who must be not only well grounded in the subjects with which they deal, but have a deep understanding of how the political system works, and how best to bring contending groups together, all the while aiming at civic improvement and new visions of the future. Some planners, even those who do not reject the idea that planning should try to comprehend development processes and decisions as a whole, may be troubled by Perloff’s privileging of the future. As Hok-Lin Leung (1994) notes, "Planners have too often neglected the immediate, the particular, and the contingent, the very stuff of life. Maybe its time to focus a little more on the concrete and experiential, and aim at making daily life decent." John Friedmann (1993) has argued for what he terms a "non-Euclidian" mode of planning dedicated to the real time events of everyday rather than an imagined future time. In this light, planning becomes less a way of preparing documents and more a way of bringing planning knowledge and practice directly to bear on the action itself. And for Friedmann, the appropriate place for planners to be in the thick of the action is regionally and locally. In Friedmann’s view a non-Euclidian (or non-engineering) planning would be normative (addressed to the question, planning for whom and for what?); innovative (aimed at focused – rather than comprehensive – creative solutions to social, physical and environmental problems in the public domain); political (taking power seriously by acting strategically to overcome resistance to change); transactive (based on face to face transactions between planners and the affected population); and, based on social learning (the importance of critical feedback, and institutional memory). Friedmann’s non-Euclidian planners are primarily entrepreneurs, who mobilize resources and seek to concert public and private energies around innovative solutions to stubborn problems in the public domain. In addition to a traditional technical and analytical competence, and a deep knowledge of the socio-spatial processes that produce urban settlements (urbanization, regional and interregional economic growth and change, the political economy of city building, cultural differentiation and change, the transformation of nature into urban habitat, and urban politics), Friedmann (1998) argues that planners need to know about and how to do community organization and mobilization, fund raising, networking and coalition building, social and policy criticism, political liaison, media and publicity, and legal work. In this conception, the planner is "...engaged as a partisan, working with groups about whose projects she cares." One could argue that the non-Euclidian model of planning departs too far from urban and regional planning’s domain, which for Manuel Castells (1998) even in the "information age" is above all about spatial transformation. Castells maintains that all other matters (economic, technological, political, cultural and social) have to grounded in a given territory, and to the communities built or threatened in that territory. Without this anchor we risk losing track of the field in this time of great change. Moreover, Castells suggests that urban and regional planning will lose its legitimacy if it seeks to extend its reach to all issues taking place in the urbanized world. For Castells, the world faces four fundamental challenges in the information age that planners can speak to: environmental sustainability; the mega-process of global urbanization (especially the need for new and retro-fitted infrastructure); the reconstruction of cultural meaning in spatial forms and processes (particularly in light of electronic information flows, globalization, and real virtuality); and, the shift towards local and regional governments as the decisive level of governance, management and democratic participation. In facing these and other related issues, Castells reminds us that planning is a profession, not an academic discipline. Planning has always drawn from a variety of academic disciplines and its strength is in its interdisciplinary character, that makes it possible to build tools from whichever materials are available, moving freely across borders to think, design and act. As such, planning education should be based on flexibility, a set of building blocks from various disciplines, and a strong grounding in methods. Castells conceives of methods in a very broad sense, putting particular emphasis on writing and speaking skills as something absolutely decisive in the information age. He recommends classical seminars in rhetoric as a way to enable people to link their knowledge to their communication abilities. Together with writing and speaking skills, Castells stresses the importance of expertise in the use and manipulation of information systems, including graphics, design, and quantitative analysis . Finally, he includes emphasis on three fields of knowledge and professional expertise as a common core of skills and basic knowledge necessary to deal with his four main issues mentioned above: economic analysis, history of architecture and urban design, and political sociology of city and regional institutions. Anchor Points for Continuing Professional Development Even in this cursory overview, it is easy to get bogged down in the wide array of contending perspectives on planning education. How one feels about any one of these points of view may be a matter of personal style, the context of one’s practice, or political preference. Since the concern in this article is with continuing professional development, rather than a core planning curriculum, all may be equally valid. Nevertheless, one may ask if there are any anchor points that can help ground our professional identity and give us guidance in establishing a role for PIBC in continuing professional development? A related question was considered by the Strategic Marketing Committee of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, which identified five broad topic areas where planning has strategic advantages:
These may or may not be the right anchor points to ground the work of PIBCs Education Committee. Certainly the broader theoretical debate on the proper role and domain of professional planning practice will continue to unfold, shedding new light on the issues and questions we face, while nonetheless remaining, perhaps paradoxically, unresolved. In the interim, in real time, we planners need ongoing opportunities for learning and training to better help us meet the challenges we face on the job. As PIBCs Education Committee where should we start, and where should we go? Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the members PIBC Education Committee for the title of this article and their comments on the draft. I would also like to thank Ian Wight for his thoughts and comments and for sending me many references, including some of those cited. References:
|
|
[ PIBC HOME ] |
