Planning Theory

In her 1998 book Towards Cosmopolis, Leonie Sandercock deconstructs what she calls the “heroic” story of planning history as found in leading texts. These mainstream histories, she says, may champion various (male) heroes such as Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes or Daniel Burnham, but the real hero, she observes, is the planning profession itself.

For as often as the Gulf Coast and 9/11 debacles and their aftermaths have been analyzed, one discussion has been conspicuously missing: how starkly those events, natural and man-made, revealed the inability of planning today--however professionally designed, organized and regulated—to contend with the vagaries of circumstances and conditions out of its control.