ABSTRACT

Principled adaptability is a planning style that responds to professional planners' reality: dealing with messes and wicked problems. A principled adaptability style is perceptive and seeking of feedback and learning. It keeps planners engaged within their organization and with external stakeholders. In addition to principled adaptability, planners may adopt an agenda-driven or technocratic planning style. Agenda-driven planning styles are propelled by advocacy for issues, whether that is greenhouse gas reduction, social justice, affordable housing, or creating places that restore human well-being. The chapter suggests using reflection to move practice choices and strategies from a background, unexamined level to an explicit one. Planners graduate from school having learned some or all of these theories. But planning practice draws on too many theories, of too many types, that are too contradictory for a universally agreed-upon and uniform theory to exist.