ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways planners must negotiate the worlds of analysis, politics, and passion simultaneously. 1 When planners meet with developers or community residents, advisory boards or decision makers, they have to deal with emotion no less than reason, with passion no less than rationality. Addressing options and recommending actions, planners typically try to enlarge other people's visions of what is possible and what is at stake: how a particular project, for example, could be built or redesigned, pushed through or delayed, applauded, modified, or sent back to the drawing boards. By examining a “project review” negotiation between city planners and a developer's team proposing to build a 180-unit apartment complex, we can see how skillful planning requires not only a micro-politics of “what planners say when and how” (Forester 1989), but emotionally perceptive and responsive practical judgment as well (Healey 1992; Hoch 1994; Throgmorton 1992). 2
