CRP 980X
Planning Theory and Practice
Instructor: Barbara Parmenter
Unique Number: 01185

This course is required for all planning students. It is the first part of a three-semester 980 sequence that will introduce you to your chosen professional field of study and practice (the second semester focuses on planning methods, and the third semester is a integrative planning workshop). The goal of this course is to help you understand the evolution of urban and regional planning and the changing concepts that have guided this evolution. In Western democratic societies, planners often find themselves in an ambivalent role amongst many other players in the sphere of urban development and governance. Planners are duty bound to serve the "public interest", be concerned with long-range consequences of current actions, and understand the complex interconnections between economics, transportation, environment, land use, social equity, infrastructure, etc. At the same time, other powerful political and market processes are at work that often confound these duties for good or ill. Planners have been roundly criticized throughout the history of their profession and less often praised, and yet the need for planning has long been recognized. Today as urban sprawl looms as a growing political issue, that need is more publicly apparent than ever. In studying the history of planning, students will understand the development of the dynamic tension between planning and democracy, the various responses that have been proposed, the failures and successes that have been recorded. Within this historical context, we will explore the development of and debates surrounding planning theory, by which we mean those concepts that guide how planners work. Even those planners who swear they have nothing to do with theory must base their actions on some idea of what constitutes "good" planning, and those ideas have changed markedly over time. Our job will be to examine them and bring them out into the open for discussion and critique. Finally, we will examine the ethical bases of the planning profession, more specifically the tendency of planners to serve particular interests within the general "public interest", and the ethical failures and dilemmas that this creates.

We will focus primarily on Anglo-American planning history, but will pay some attention to planning in other areas of the world as well. If they desire, students are encouraged to focus their course work on cities outside the Anglo-American realm.

Course Work

Course work will consist primarily of discussions of reading assignments and a series "case city" assignments (see Case Study Overview for more details). There will be fairly heavy reading assignments every week, and you are expected to complete these in time for class discussion and to participate actively in class discussion and debate. The semester-long case study will be a group project (3-4 people in each group) focusing on a single city region. This project consists of a series of assignments that require you to research different planning topics and concepts as they evolved in that city and its surrounding region. Each assignment will be written up in the form of a set of web pages, and the final project will be a web site for your case city region.

Grading

Your grade will be based on the following:

Class participation and attendance: 25%
Case city web project: 75%