In his article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, William Lucy (1994) argues that “planning educators and professionals should take a more expansive view of the field of urban and regional planning” (p. 305). He further outlines three themes about the scope of the planning profession: (1) planning should aim at sustaining both “healthy people and healthy places”; (2) planners should “expand their roles and subjects . . . by overlapping more into public administration and policy analysis”; and (3) “planning should address physical design and environmental sustainability” to help “achieve intimate connections between healthy people and places” (Lucy, 1994, pp. 305-306). In an earlier article (from which Lucy derived his title), Aaron Wildavsky (1973) argues the opposite position, that planning has lost its focus and “if planning is everything, maybe it is nothing” (p. 127). Write an essay that explores your perspective on the role of the planner. Do you agree with Lucy’s, Wildavsky’s, or some other perspective presented in Fainstein and DeFilippis? Which parts of each argument do you agree with? How would the planning profession be different if we accepted the definition of planning proposed by these authors? What are the limitations of these views of planning? Respond in an essay of 200 words or more that uses at least two of the course readings to support your argument.
