Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action

Front Cover
Princeton University Press, 1987 M10 21 - 501 pages

John Friedmann addresses a central question of Western political theory: how, and to what extent, history can be guided by reason. In this comprehensive treatment of the relation of knowledge to action, which he calls planning, he traces the major intellectual traditions of planning thought and practice. Three of these--social reform, policy analysis, and social learning--are primarily concerned with public management. The fourth, social mobilization, draws on utopianism, anarchism, historical materialism, and other radical thought and looks to the structural transformation of society "from below." After developing a basic vocabulary in Part One, the author proceeds in Part Two to a critical history of each of the four planning traditions. The story begins with the prophetic visions of Saint-Simon and assesses the contributions of such diverse thinkers as Comte, Marx, Dewey, Mannheim, Tugwell, Mumford, Simon, and Habermas. It is carried forward in Part Three by Friedmann's own nontechnocratic, dialectical approach to planning as a method for recovering political community.

 

Contents

The Terrain of Planning Theory
19
TRADITIONS
49
Two Centuries of Planning Theory An Overview
51
Planning as Social Reform
87
Planning as Policy Analysis
137
Planning as Social Learning
181
Planning as Social Mobilization
225
EMERGENTS
309
The Recovery of Political Community
343
The Mediations of Radical Planning
389
Epilogue
413
Planning as a Form of Scientific Management
421
The Professionalization of Policy Analysis
433
Marxism and Planning Theory
437
Bibliography
449
Index
489

Where Do We Stand?
311
From Critique to Reconstruction
317

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