Acting On Ethics In City Planning

How do practicing planners understand the ethics of their profession? What do they do when confronted with ethical conflicts in their day-today work? How can the planning profession help planners make ethical decisions? In this insightful, lively, and compassionate book, Elizabeth Howe explores how planners define ethical issues and make ethical choices. Howe is not concerned with a distant or abstract ethics but rather with the actual ethical dilemmas planners face in everyday practice. This book is about real people making difficult choices in real situations. The cases Howe examines derive from nearly 150 hours of personal interviews with 96 professional planners, and responses to follow-up questionnaires. One planner, for example, realized that complete and accurate reporting of a technical analysis would have politically damaging consequences. Another found that her promise of confidentiality to a developer conflicted with her commitment to fairness and an open planning process. For a third, loyalty to elected officials was at odds with his deeply held belief that the public interest would be furthered through construction of affordable housing. To what extent did planners define these as ethical issues, what did they think about them, and how did they act? Howe's answers to these questions are perceptive and revealing. In Part I, she probes the nature of ethical issues through a hierarchy of principles including lawfulness, justice, accountability, and serving the public interest. Part II reveals that planners' actions vary considerably depending on how they view the role of planners (from technician to activist) and on their approach to ethics. She explores the determinants of ethical action in Part III. This book should be read by every practicing planner wondering how others deal with the workaday world. It is required reading for every student seeking a glimpse of the profession outside the classroom. And it will inform and reward all those concerned with the necessity of acting on ethics in an imperfect world.

Over the past fifty years professional understanding of planning has changed markedly. In the past, planning was primarily described as a technical activity involving data collection, analysis, and synthesis of physical plans and supporting policies. Now planning is seen as a much broader set of human activities, encompassing the physical world and also the realm of public and social services. Not surprisingly, planners' discussions of ethics have evolved. Professional ethics is regarded by many planners to be limited to a set of rules of behavior regarding interactions with the public, sources of data, government officials, and one another.This shift is symbolized by the evolution of the labels by which ethics is known: from a circumscribed view of professional ethics to a broader concept of ethics in planning; both of which are discussed in this book. Sue Hendler argues that planners recognize that every act of planning pursues certain human values and is a series of statements about what we take to be right or wrong and what we take to represent the highest priorities of the society.Planning Ethics explores planning within alternative moral theories, including liberalism, communitarianism, environmentalism, and feminism. The contributors illustrate the application of these ethical principles in specific planning contexts encompassing community development, land conversion, waste management, electric power planning, and education planning. This is the next generation of thinking on ethics and planning. It will be a centerpiece of every planning curriculum.

Some planners limit discussions of ethics to simple, though important, questions about the propriety of their daily activities. This approach to ethics restricts discussion of professional ethics to the propriety of everyday social and professional relationships. It ignores the broader ethical content of planning practice, methods, and policies. While narrow definitions of ethical behavior can easily preoccupy public officials and professional associations, they divert attention from more profound moral issues.Martin Wachs argues that ethical issues are implicit in nearly all planning decisions. For illustrative and educational reasons, it is useful to divide ethics in planning into four distinct categories. The first category includes the moral implications of bureaucratic practices and rules of behavior regarding clients and supervisors. The second category includes ethical judgments which planners make in exercising their "administrative discretion." More complex, and represented by a third category, are the moral implications of methods and the ethical content of criteria built into planning techniques and models. The final type represents the basic choices which society makes - those inherent in the consideration of major policy alternatives.Ethics in Planning contains a variety of representative papers to capture the current state of thinking. This book will be important as a text for survey classes in professional ethics given by university planning programs. It should also supplement short courses in planning ethics for practicing professionals and provide source materials for discussions of planning ethics sponsored by local chapters of the American Planning Association and similar organizations. It gathers together exemplary and critical works, thus it will also interest individual planners in a field that only continues to grow in recognition and importance.

The book gives practising planners with varying experiences an opportunity to discuss the way these problems have arisen in their work and strategies they have adopted to cope with them.

"This book is on the suggested reading list for planners preparing to take the AICP exam. As veteran planner the author points out, the most troublesome conflicts for planners aren't between good and bad, they're between competing good, neither of which can be fully achieved. The 54 real-world scenarios described here typify the tough moral dilemmas that confront today's practioners. The author offers planners a way to recognize the ethical conflicts that arise in everyday practice, analyze them using ""practical moral reasoning,"" apply relevant sections of the AICP Code of Ethics and the APA/AICP Ethical Principles in Planning (both of which are included in full), and decide on the best course of action. The author tells a series of stories-each one a sticky situation that could confront a typical planner. Barrett points out the ethical issues, identifies possible alternatives, and cities relevant sections of the AICP Code. Finally, the author discusses the pros and cons of each alternative. Five particularly complex scenarios are especially intended for group discussion. Individuals studying for the AICP exam will find this book indispensable. But it also should be required reading for every planner who struggles to act ethically and for planning student who wants to understand how professionals define and serve the public interest. Planning agencies, private consulting firms, and planning commissions can use its realistic scenarios to jump start group discussions and workshops on ethical planning."

For many young planners, the noble intentions with going to planning school seem starkly out of place in the neoliberal worlds they have come to inhabit. For some, the huge gap between the power they thought they would have and what they actually do is not only worrying, but also deeply discouraging. But for some others, practice means finding practical and creative solutions to overcome challenges and complexities. How do young planners in different settings respond to seemingly similar situations like these? What do they do – give up, adjust, or fight back? What role did their planning education play, and could it have helped in preparing and assisting them to respond to the world they are encountering? In this edited volume, stories of young planners from sixteen countries that engage these questions are presented. The sixteen cases range from settings with older, established planning systems (e.g., USA, the Netherlands, and the UK) to settings where the system is less set (e.g., Brazil), being remodeled (e.g., South Africa and Bosnia Herzegovina), and under stress (e.g., Turkey and Poland). Each chapter explores what might be done differently to prepare young planners for the complexities and challenges of their ‘real worlds’. This book not only points out what is absent, but also offers planning educators an alternative vision. The editors and esteemed contributors provide reflections and suggestions as to how this new generation of young planners can be supported to survive in, embrace, and change the world they are encountering, and, in the spirit of planning, endeavor to ‘change it for the better’.

"Over the past fifty years professional understanding of planning has changed markedly. In the past, planning was primarily described as a technical activity involving data collection, analysis, and synthesis of physical plans and supporting policies. Now planning is seen as a much broader set of human activities, encompassing the physical world and also the realm of public and social services. Not surprisingly, planners' discussions of ethics have evolved. Professional ethics is regarded by many planners to be limited to a set of rules of behavior regarding interactions with the public, sources of data, government officials, and one another.This shift is symbolized by the evolution of the labels by which ethics is known: from a circumscribed view of professional ethics to a broader concept of ethics in planning; both of which are discussed in this book. Sue Hendler argues that planners recognize that every act of planning pursues certain human values and is a series of statements about what we take to be right or wrong and what we take to represent the highest priorities of the society.Planning Ethics explores planning within alternative moral theories, including liberalism, communitarianism, environmentalism, and feminism. The contributors illustrate the application of these ethical principles in specific planning contexts encompassing community development, land conversion, waste management, electric power planning, and education planning. This is the next generation of thinking on ethics and planning. It will be a centerpiece of every planning curriculum."--Provided by publisher.

City of Well-being provides a radical and holistic introduction to the science and art of town planning. It starts from the premise that the purpose of planning is the health, well-being and sustainable quality of life of people. Drawing on current and historic examples it offers inspiration, information and an integrated perspective which challenges all professions and decision-makers that affect the urban environment. It is both authoritative and readable, designed for students, practitioners, politicians and civil society. The science. Summarizing the most recent research, the book demonstrates the interrelationships between the huge issues of obesity, unhealthy lifestyles, inequality, mental illness, climate change and environmental quality. The radical implications for transport, housing, economic, social and energy policies are spelt out. The art and politics. The book examines how economic development really happens, and how spatial decisions reinforce or undermine good intentions. It searches for the creative strategies, urban forms and neighbourhood designs that can marry the ideal with the real. The relationship of planning and politics is tackled head-on, leading to conclusions about the role of planners, communities and development agencies in a pluralistic society. Healthy planning principles could provide a powerful logical motivation for all practitioners.