John Forester

Raphael Fischler

Deborah Shmueli

This book documents the goals, lives, experiences, and practice of planners, architects, and community organizers who have contributed to the physical and social development of the modern state of Israel. In their own words, these "community builders" share their professional experiences of how they protect and rebuild cities and neighborhoods, how they overcome stereotypes and bureaucratic inertia, how they protect the natural environment and the public health as well. The stories illustrate the practical world of community change in which aesthetics and politics, ethnicity and tradition, commitment and inspiration, hard work and hope all play a part. Students of urban and community life in many countries will be able to draw elements and themes from these particular stories that resonate with their own concerns, experience, and future work.

Profiles of Community Builders

Israeli Planners and Designers

Moreover, unequal power relations tend to heighten levels of conflict.

Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes

Dealing with Differences

Professor of City and Regional Planning John Forester

In their own words, the stories of the men and women who are the planners, architects, community organizers--the hidden builders--of the modern state of Israel.

Why do our best-laid plans often over-reach and under-achieve? Why do our attempts to solve problems in some rational way often run afoul of politics and power? Why do we so often accomplish so little, even as we sense that so much more is possible? By looking closely at the work of city planners, Planning in the Face of Power addresses these questions and provides a new way of thinking about the practical and inevitably political work of improving our neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, and the public institutions that shape our lives. Power and inequality are realities that planners of all kinds must face in the practical world. In Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester argues that effective, public-serving planners can overcome the traditional—but paralyzing—dichotomies of being either professional or political, detached and distantly rational or engaged and change-oriented. Because inequalities of power directly structure planning practice, planners who are blind to relations of power will inevitably fail. Forester shows how, in the face of the conflict-ridden demands of practice, planners can think politically and rationally at the same time, avoid common sources of failure, and work to advance both a vision of the broader public good and the interests of the least powerful members of society. This book provides a systematic reformulation of the politics of professional practice in the arena of city planning, public policy making, and public administration and management. It has immediate implications for the study of administration and management and for students of administration and planning in schools of social work, education, and public health. While focusing concretely on problems of planning practice (e.g. planners' sources of influence, their difficulties of listening critically, their understandings of the politics of organizations), Planning in the Face of Power brings to bear a wide range of theoretical insights and so integrates social and political theory with the demands of actual practice. Accordingly, the book will be important to practitioners who seek to understand the pressures they face at work as well as social theorists who wish to integrate theory and practice more powerfully, but will also appeal to the general reader interested in gaining an understanding of the practice of planning in the face of the realities of social equality and power.

Planning in the Face of Power

Pianificazione e potere. Pratiche e teorie interattive del progetto urbano

Statistical Selection of Business Strategies

Frank Fischer

Drawing upon the work of such theorists as Foucault, Habermas, Toulmin and Wittgenstein, this book brings recent work on language and argumentation to bear on the practical concerns of policy analysis and planning. The European and US contributors to the book examine the interplay of language, action and power in terms of both applied policy and theoretical debates. Emphasizing the political nature of the work of planners and policy-makers, the book stresses the role of persuasive arguments in practical decision contexts. Recognizing the rhetorical, communicative character of planning and policy deliberations, the writers demonstrate that policy arguments are necessarily selective, both shaping and being shaped by power relations.

John Forester

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