Introduction

The growth of university-based instruction in what is variously described as “city and regional,” “town,” or “urban” planning has encouraged the development of a community of academic planning theoreticians. The members of this community read each other's work, speak to one another across the printed page and, often, know each other personally. The small size of the community and its ties to schools of a “minor profession” limit its audience and external prestige but not its intellectual ambitions. “Planning”—as idea and activity—carries the theoreticians into the center of debates over the nature of social and ethical inquiry and the great choices that confront us when the future seems open to our efforts. Large areas of the social sciences and humanities—read as reflections on the links between planning processes and their outcomes— are incorporated into the domain of the community even if it sometimes seems that a minnow has swallowed a whale.