theory of planning

1. • A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially
one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions
about natural phenomena.
• The branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles,
and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice
• A set of theorems that constitute a systematic view of a branch of mathematics.
DEFINITION OF THEORY IN GENERAL
• Abstract reasoning; speculation: a decision based on experience rather than theory.
• A belief or principle that guides action or assists comprehension or judgment: staked out the
house on the theory that criminals usually return to the scene of the crime.
• An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.
DEFINITION OF THEORY IN GENERAL

2. DEFINITION OF THEORY IN GENERAL
A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles
independent of the thing to be explained.
• Idea
• Notion
• Hypothesis
• postulate,
• principle,
• law,
• Doctrine

3. DEFINITION OF PLANNING THEORY
Engine that drives RENEWAL OF PLANNING PRACTICE through REFLECTION and the
GENERATION OF NEW IDEAS.
Planning Theory is the body
of scientific concepts, definitions,
behavioral relationships, and
assumptions that define the body
of knowledge of planning.
What planners do today reflect
• their understanding of practice.
• their aspirations as molded by the
planning theories they have read or
heard about, or by the ideas of others
which, in turn, were molded by theories

4. Distinctiveness of Planning Theory: Planning theory is an elusive subject of study. The
subject is slippery, and explanations are often frustratingly tautological or
disappointingly pedestrian.
First, many of the fundamental questions concerning planning belong to a much broader inquiry.
Consequently, planning theory appears to overlap with theory in all the social science
disciplines….
Second, the boundary between planners and related professionals is not mutually exclusive
Third, the field of planning is divided among those who define it according to its object or its
method.
Fourth, planning commonly borrows the diverse methodologies from many different fields, and
so its theoretical base cannot be easily drawn

5. Debates Define Theory: Six Questions of Planning Theory
❑ First, What are the historical roots of planning?
❑ Second, What is the justification for planning? When should one intervene?
❑ Third, "Rules of the Game": What values are incorporated within planning? What ethical
dilemmas do planners face?
❑ Fourth, The Constraints on Planning Power. How can planning be effective within a
mixed economy Structure?
❑ Fifth, Style of Planning: What do Planners do?
❑ Sixth, The Enduring Question of the Public Interest

6. PLANNING THEORY AND HISTORY
Definition of Planning
• Planning as a basic human activity that pervades human behavior at every level of society
- “a plan is any hierarchical process in the organism that can control the order in which a sequence of operations is to
be performed”
• Planning as a rational choice that meets certain standards of logic
- “ a process for determining appropriate future actions through a sequence of choices”
• Planning as control of future action
• Planning as a special kind of problem solving.
• Planning is: Societal, Future-oriented, Non-routinized, Deliberate, Action-oriented.
• Planning is the deliberate social or organizational activity of developing an optimal strategy for achieving a desired set
of goals.
• Planning aims to apply methods of rational choice to determining a best set of future actions addressed to novel
problems in complex contexts.
• It is attended by the power and intention to commit resources and to act as necessary to implement the chosen strategy

7. DEFINITION OF PLANNING THEORY
Three basic eras characterized its subsequent history:
These formative years where the pioneers (Ebezener Howard, David Burnham, etc.) did not yet
identify themselves as planners (late 1800s to 1910);
the period of institutionalization, professionalization and self-recognition of planning, as well
as the rise of regional and federal planning efforts (1910 to1945);
the postwar era of standardization, crisis and diversification of planning (Krueckeberg 1983).
At the most basic level, this framework gives the story of planning-at least modern
professional planning-a starting point. Planning emerges as the 20th Century
response to the 19th Century industrial city (Hall 1988).
WHAT ARE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF PLANNING

8. WHAT IS JUSTIFICATION OF PLANNING &WHEN TO INTERVENE
❑ Planning is intervention: To intentionally alter the existing course of events. The timing and
legitimacy of planned intervention therefore become central questions to planning theory
❑ The duality between planning and the market is a defining framework in planning theory-
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP.
❖ Public sector planners borrow tools developed in the private sector, such as strategic
planning. The emergence of autonomous public authorities to manage marine ports,
airports and other infrastructures has created hybrid organizations that act both like a
public agency and a private firm
❖ the growing non-profit or "third sector" further demonstrates the inadequacies of viewing
the world in a purely dichotomous framework of the government vs. the market.

9. VALUES WITHIN PLANNING & ETHICAL DILEMMA OF PLANNERS
❖ A planner's loyalty is torn between serving employers, fellow planners, and the public. In this
contested terrain of loyalties, what remains of the once-accepted cornerstone of planning:
serving the public interest?
❖ Planning has conflicting loyalties to the goals of economic development, social justice, and
environmental protection.
This triad of goals create deep-seated tensions not only between planners and the outside
world, but also within planning itself.
❖ But the development of technical forecasting methods nevertheless is necessary if planners
are to fulfill their responsibility of designing policies for the long term.

10. EFFECTIVENESS OF PLANNING IN MIXED MARKET STRUCTURE
❖ Planners work within the constraints of the capitalist political economy, and their urban
visions compete with developers, consumers, and other more powerful groups.
❖ Despite the planning ideal of a holistic, proactive vision, planners are frequently restricted to
playing frustratingly reactive, regulatory roles.
❖ The resulting public-private partnerships (planners as developers) make the planner more
activist.

11. STYLE OF PLANNING - WHAT DO PLANNERS DO
In standard accounts of planning theories-COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING as the attempt to
coordinate the multiple development and regulatory initiatives undertaken in a region
or city.
IT FAILED FOR TWO REASONS
❑ First, it required a level of knowledge and analysis that was impossibly complex, or that planners had no special
capacity to coordinate all the specialists-WAY FOR INCREMENTAL PLANNING (CARLS LINDBLOM)
❑ Second, it presumed a common public interest but in doing so only gave voice to one interest and ignored the needs
of the poor and the weak.
This critique led to the call for advocacy planning (PAUL DAVIDOFF)
❑ STRATEGIC PLANNING (1970 to 1980’s) & EQUITY PLANNING emerged as a less combative form of
advocacy planning that allowed planners to serve the interests of the poor from within the system (NORMAN
KRUMHOLZ)

12. COMPREHENSIVE VS. INCREMENTAL PLANNING, OBJECTIVITY VS. ADVOCACY,
CENTRALIZATION VS. DECENTRALIZATION, TOP-DOWN VS. BOTTOM UP LEADERSHIP,
and PLANNING FOR PEOPLE VS. PLANNING FOR PLACE.
Incremental planners claimed its excessive complexity prevented the planner from directly serving the comprehensive
public interest, while advocate planners argued that what was portrayed as the public interest was merely the interests of
the privileged.
Postmodernists provided planning with a needed break from its preoccupation with a monolithic "public" (represented by
Le Corbusier's and Robert Moses' love of the public but disdain for people);
Planners serve the public interest by negotiating a kind of multi-cultural, technocratic pluralism. The recent interest in
communicative action – planners as communicators rather than as autonomous, systematic thinkers -- also reflectsthis
effort to renew planning's focus on the public interest
ENDURING QUESTION OF PUBLIC INTEREST

13. RATIONAL PLANNING THEORY
RATIONAL PLANNING: It can only work when the problem can be easily defined and there can be a
best solution. Rational planning was the dominant planning theory through the 1950s, but is still used in
Transportation Planning.
❖ It highlighted planning's role in correcting market failures related to externalities, public goods,
inequity, transaction costs, market power, and the non-existence of markets.
❖ Justifications for planning included reduction of nuisance and congestion, protection of resources,
reduction of taxes or of public costs, provision of a stable business environment, and the improvement of
environmental quality and livability.
❖ Planning borrowed the tools and language of cost-benefit analysis and operations research, including
notions of decision criteria, multiple objectives, constraints, shadow pricing, willingness-to-pay,
optimization, and minimization.

14. INCREMENTAL PLANNING THEORY
In 1959, Charles Lindblom published the article "The Science of Muddling Through", which first
introduces the CONCEPT OF INCREMENTALISM.
❖ Lindblom argues that people make their plans and decisions in an incremental manner. He argues that people
accomplish goals through a series of successive, limited comparisons.
❖ Comprehensive or synoptic planning, as he called it, was unachievable and out of step with political realities.
❖ He argued that political leaders cannot agree on goals in advance, as the rational model requires. They prefer to
choose policies and goals at the same time.
❖ Comparison of all possible alternatives and their comprehensive assessment on all measures of performance
exceeds human abilities.
The real measure of "good policy" is whether policymakers agree on it. Lindblom’s alternative, incrementalism, calls
for the simultaneous selection of goals and policies, consideration of alternatives only marginally different from
the status quo, limited comparisons among the alternatives, and the preference for results of social experimentation
over theory as the basis of analysis.

15. THEORY OF MIXED SCANNING
• Amitai Etzioni's (1967) middle range bridge was an effort to reconcile rational planning with incrementalism.
• The strategic planning movement drew heavily from Lindblom's ideas, arguing for a focus on organizational survival
rather than societal benefit, short-rather than long-range time horizons, and the use of impression in the absence
of hard data.
Amitai Etzioni introduced the concept of mixed scanning
❖ as a compromise between the rational and incremental planning
theories.
❖ fundamental policy-shaping decisions should be based on a more
careful rational analysis of alternatives.
❖ assumes that there is a centralized decision-making process. As
with the rational and incremental approaches, it does not identify
who is involved in the process or whose values are used.
Amitai Etzioni, Concept of mixed scanning

16. THEORY OF ADVOCACY PLANNING
Paul Davidoff's (1965) article, “Advocacy and Pluralism in
Planning,”
❖ resonated with the frustration of many planners in their inability
to meaningfully address the social and economic issues.
❖ Plural Plans for public consideration. Distribution of planning
services into low-income, minority neighborhoods.
❖ Advocate planners who would be physically located in
neighborhoods and would represent the interests of
neighborhood residents in city level planning processes.
If these were not forthcoming, it was the duty of the city
government to appoint advocates to represent the neighborhood.

17. THEORY OF EQUITY PLANNING
• Norman Krumholz adopted Equity Planning in
Cleveland, during the 1970s and, as a result,
helped make the needs of its low-income groups
the highest priority.
• Krumholz's view on equity planning is that
planners should work to redistribute power,
resources, or participation away from the
elite and toward the poor and Working-Class
Resident of Community
Planners address 3 fundamental
priorities and three resulting conflicts.
Equity, Social Justice
Equity,
Social
Justice
Development
Conflict
Economic
Development
Resource
conflict
Environmental
Protection
Sustainability

18. In 1987, John Friedmann published a book titled Planning in
the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action.
In it he discusses the concept of radical planning.
➢ Radical planning takes the power away from the
government and gives it to the people. In this process,
citizens get together and develop their own plans.
➢ While radical planning cannot be fully implemented, there
are examples of the partial use of radical planning. Some
public housing authorities have turned management
decisions over to the tenants, who are responsible for
proposing change in policy. This allows increased control by
the people who live in public housing.
Progressive planners promoted public ownership
of land and job generating industries, worker-
managed enterprises, tax reform, community
organizations, and leveraging of public resources
through partnerships with private organizations that
would agree to serve public purposes.
THEORY OF RADICAL PLANNING

19. THEORY OF TRANSACTIVE PLANNING
By the early 1970s, it was normal to distinguish procedural
planning theory focusing on planning process from substantive
planning theory focusing on the growth and development of
cities.
In 1973, John Friedmann published a book titled Retracking America: A
Theory of Transactive Planning. Transactive planning theory was developed in
the 1970s as a way to get the public involved in the planning process.
There are a number of criticisms of transactive planning.
✓ The first is that it takes a large amount of time to meet with individuals and
utilize the mutual learning process.
✓ Second, how do you evaluate the importance of each person's community
knowledge?
✓ Third, transactive planning cannot work in situations in which there are large
differences in opinion and/or many stakeholders.