Urban Planning as Professional Mediation of Territorial Politics

This paper proposes an alternative way of looking at urban planning practice in contemporary North America. The discussion is organized into four major sections. Section 2 follows a brief introduction and contains a partial critique of ‘mainstream’ planning theory. The critique serves as a basis for developing and explicitly stating three presuppositions which underpin the rest of the paper. Section 3 discusses basic relationships between politics, professionalism, and the process of land occupancy. The attempt here is to conceptualize some salient features of the sociohistorical context of urban planning practice. Having sketched this context, I develop and discuss in section 4 a set of propositions regarding the nature and distinctiveness of urban planning as an occupation, the requisite competencies this distinctiveness calls for, and the role(s) of urban planning in contemporary North America. The paper concludes with a brief discussion, in section 5, of the preconditions for, and prospects of, developing a relevant and useful planning theory.