ABSTRACT
Our purpose in this chapter is to examine what it means to be a planning professional at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What is the nature of the activity and what professional identities do practitioners bring to bear upon their everyday concerns? Our analysis is based on a framework which focuses on the values and obligations which shape practitioners’ views of their roles and purpose. It explores the interactions between the actors in the planning process and the constraints and opportunities presented by the contexts in which they find themselves. The aim is not to interrogate the appropriateness of any particular theoretical tradition but to build out from the views and perspectives articulated by practitioners themselves. The primary source for these reflections are focus group discussions with practitioners carried out in 1996 (Campbell and Marshall, 1998), but which has been supplemented by more recent work (Campbell and Marshall, 1999, 2000b) including a study of planning gain (Campbell et al., 2000), and work with which we have been associated on planning education (Poxon, 2001).
