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The Book

The Lost Art of the Plan

A Guide to Seeing the City Whole. Second Edition, 2026 (First Edition: August 2025). Published by the Institute for Civic Service.

Cover of The Lost Art of the Plan: a domed civic building and a city skyline.

What the book is

You hold in your hands a work of recovery and conviction. The Lost Art of the Plan is not a conventional textbook, nor is it a detached academic history. It is a moral argument, a practical manual, and a call to action for every public servant, civic leader, and engaged citizen who believes that the American city deserves better than bureaucratic paralysis and fragmented governance.

The Lost Art of the Plan is both an indictment of our administrative retreat and an invitation to renewal. It asks public servants across every agency to set down the clipboard of the clerk, take up the tools of the civic artist, and join us in the quiet, magnificent labor of seeing the city whole.

Download the web edition (PDF, 11 MB) Read online

The web edition above is the complete book. A print edition PDF is prepared for press — Download the print edition (PDF, 76 MB).

Contents

  1. Prefacevii
  2. Introduction8
  3. Chapter 1 · The Spark: A Tale of Two Visions11
  4. Chapter 2 · The Birth of the “City Practical”24
  5. Chapter 3 · The Grand Experiment35
  6. Chapter 4 · A Profession Adrift44
  7. Chapter 5 · The Search for a North Star62
  8. Chapter 6 · The Artist’s Method: A Return to Roots Read online79
  9. Chapter 7 · A New Way of Seeing: Wicked Systems and Moral Realism90
  10. Chapter 8 · The Resilient City: Planning as a Creative Act99
  11. Works Cited106
  12. Image & Figure Credits On this site109

Page numbers are the printed folios of the Second Edition. The Preface, Introduction and Chapter 6 are published online in full; the remaining chapters are in the PDF.