Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Might students come to see the possibilities and limitations of planning as a profession and an avocation through their study of history? Might historians help students see planning as a ubiquitous and ongoing process that has shaped the present and will inform the future? Every planning report includes a history; it may be brief in scope, it may be implied or inferred, it may be potted. Planners can do better. Their histories ought to reveal the fact that multiple, competing paradigms are always in play; that those who preceded us grappled with issues similar to those that challenge us today; that they crafted policy, drew up plans, and struggled for justice to the best of their ability; that we build upon their success and failure; that all plans are compromised in implementation; and, perhaps most importantly, that humility and persistence have been and remain essential when you aspire to make change.

Keywords

concrete skepticism usable past experiential learning place liberal professional education

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Richard White , “Introduction,” to the symposium “Land Use Planning Then and Now: Learning from History,” Center for the Study of the North American West, Stanford University, Stanford, California, March 16, 2003.

For an admittedly anecdotal assay of texts in use, see an exchange on Planning Educators Electronic Mail Network (Planet) initiated by Martin Krieger (Fall 2003), http://listserv.buffalo.edu/archives/planet.html.

and Richard White , The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995).

For this essay, references to practice are references to public sector planning unless noted otherwise.

I am thinking here of problems social scientists describe as “messy” or “wicked”; often, such problems are embedded in systems and structures that appear intractable and unchanging. How might we alleviate inequity (economic, social, and political), how might we reduce disparities, and how might we do good in a world of competing interests?

Despite the fact that the school has two tenured faculty trained in history, it does not require a history of planning course for the graduate degree. MPL students can take the undergraduate survey as an elective; one or two a year choose to do so. Recently, the MPL curriculum committee eliminated a two-unit, half-semester “how to” course intended to introduce methods of fieldwork, observation, and the analysis of primary documents with select readings in place-based histories. Discussions of curriculum in a professional school or program revolve around skill sets (statistics, finance, law, policy analysis, environmental regulation, and the like): what information, which computational programs, and what models do prospective employers expect those they hire will bring to the job?

Author conversation with Martin Krieger.

A returning student who had practiced real estate development found William Wyckoff’s account of the Holland Land Company’s speculative venture in western New York during the early nineteenth century analogous to current strategies. His strong claims impressed other students (and the instructor) to such a degree that I had much less need to draw attention to continuity that semester. See William Wyckoff , The Developer’s Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).

Jacob Riis , How the Other Half Lives (1890; reprint, Boston: Bedford, 1996).

10.

William Cronon , “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 1-22, quote on 7.

11.

This is not a judgment of value. I trained in architecture and then history in an architecture school; I was hired to teach in a planning program that is now in a policy school. That training is a benefit. I rely on the time in practice for legitimacy in a way that is similar to the practitioner adjuncts that are so essential for professional training.

Teaching Planners History

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References