Facilitator's Introduction to Session 2

Leonie Sandercock

QUESTION 2

What planning roles will become more salient in the next decade?

SUMMARY COMMENTS

1. Planners as entrepreneurs of sustainability: advocating and implementing sustainability concepts.
2. Design strikes back: the return of the repressed. Two-dimensional role as place makers in urban development, and as designers with nature (integrating the landscape with the built environment).
3. Planners as leaders, future thinkers, bearers of a vision of the good society.
4. Planners as negotiators, mediators and facilitators, with attitude (that is, committed advocates).
5. Planners working with diverse communities in collaborative, communicative and participatory roles.
6. The getting of political wisdom: becoming consciously skilled 'players', power-brokers, bargainers...

BREAKOUT QUESTIONS

1. Can any one planning program teach all of these ambitious and sophisticated roles? Should they even try? Should each program develop strengths in a couple of these roles, and recruit accordingly?
2. Are there shared values underpinning each or most of these roles that we could identify and promulgate as 'what the profession stands for'?
3. What substantive knowledges, and what process skills (political and communicative) are fundamental to these emerging roles, and are we teaching them?