Reclaiming the Lost Art

Chapter 5 — The Search for a North Star

The profession solved the problem of itself: the procedures, participation requirements and specializations built after urban renewal succeeded in preventing the old harms, but at a profound and unforeseen cost. The protective process has, in a very real sense, eaten the plan, and no new mission or vision has risen to replace the discredited consensus, leaving planning a ship without a north star. Searching the wreckage for solid ground, the chapter finds one enduring point of near-universal agreement: the plan itself, the profession’s signature product, its name and its measure of value, is the anchor on which a renewed identity could be built.

Key points

• The modern identity crisis is a vacuum: after more than a hundred years of practice, the profession must again ask what planning is, what its purpose is, and what it is trying to build.
• Fragmentation is the crisis’s root: a profession founded on comprehensiveness shattered into specialized silos, the transportation planner, the housing advocate, the environmental specialist, whose goals often conflict and whose languages no longer meet.
• Process displaced product: the intricate machinery designed to prevent harm made plan-making itself secondary, leaving practitioners unable to state a mission beyond the narrow remit of their departments.
• One consensus survived every critique: the plan remains the profession’s most important product, the centerpiece of its work and the ultimate measure of its effectiveness.