Policy, Planning, and People: Promoting Justice in Urban Development

Chapter 1. The Profession of Urban Planning and its Societal Mandate

Chapter 1 The Profession of Urban Planning and Its Societal Mandate Naomi Carmon Modern urban planning is over a hundred years old, yet there is still no internal agreement about its mission and little external recognition of its societal role. This opening essay is intended to promote agreement among planners regarding their societal responsibility, a step that in turn may enhance external recognition of the planning profession and its societal mandate. The chapter may be viewed as a personal statement. It is based on observations , findings, and interpretations regarding the knowledge field and the profession of urban planning, which have been evolving from the time I first attended classes at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT— some forty years ago. Since then I have been a planning scholar, a planning educator, and a planning consultant, mainly in Israel but also in the United States, and I have had the opportunity to travel and talk to, and with, colleagues and practitioners on four continents. Is Urban Planning a Profession? In order to answer this question, we must first analyze the meaning of the term profession. A “profession”1 is a special kind of community of persons who share the same special kind of occupation. Occupations whose practitioners assume responsibility for the affairs of others and provide a service that is indispensable for the public good are granted the standing of a profession (Kultgen 1988). Being recognized by the broader society as the sole 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 13 3/14/13 9:48 AM 14 Naomi Carmon or primary provider of this indispensable service, or, in other words, having a mandate from the society to provide services in a specific field (medicine , law, engineering), is a basic attribute of a profession. Another trait of professions is their organization through professional communities (Goode 1957). A professional community is characterized by three communalorganizational attributes: (a) It develops and maintains an elaborate training program; newcomers to the community have to study for several years, acquire comprehensive knowledge of the theory and practice of the occupation , and absorb its special professional values; they have to pass formal examinations before being allowed to practice what they have learned. (b) It creates a code of conduct, or professional ethics, which includes at least three distinct elements: responsibility toward colleagues within the profession, responsibility toward those who use the services of the profession, and responsibility toward society at large. (c) It establishes professional institutions to oversee proper training and proper conduct of its members and to censure or punish those who transgress. Defining an occupation as a profession is not a binary matter of either “yes” or “no.” The various professions are part of a continuum, with medicine , which conforms to practically all the above noted characteristics of a profession, at one end, and barbers, who maintain very few of the attributes of a profession, at the other. Between these, one finds distributed along the continuum all the other occupations. Because professionals carry out work that is considered interesting, and for which they are usually well remunerated , occupations seek to progress toward professionalization. They develop a distinct body of knowledge and obligatory training programs with requirements for entry and graduation, create codes of professional ethics, establish institutions for internal inspection, and lobby legislators to approve laws that will grant them exclusivity in their work. In this manner, through the years, many occupations (social work, for example) have succeeded in advancing themselves along the professional continuum. Let’s now turn back to the question of whether urban planning is a profession , or at least a vocation in a process of professionalization. The answer appears to be positive. For more than a hundred years there have been university programs to train urban planners, many of which are subject to an accreditation process. Gradually, a theoretical and practical body of knowledge has formed, which is distinct and has its particular objectives, although based on knowledge from other disciplines. Associations of professional planners have been established and processes of professional certification 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 14 3/14/13 9:48 AM 15 Urban Planning and Its Societal Mandate are now institutionalized. Planners’ associations usually have an elaborate ethical code (e.g., the APA code, AICP 2009) and issues of planning ethics play an important part in theoretical and professional debates. Hence, the communal-organizational conditions required of a profession are already in...