ABSTRACT
Planning is barely accepted in some areas, and in dozens of states, cities and towns are under no obligation to have a plan nor to hire a person with planning education or experience. Planners work amid a confusing array of federal, state, and local public agencies with different missions and regulatory authority or funding responsibility, all of which affect what the planner must or can do. The challenge for planners has grown as organized interests have increasingly become active players in planning decisions and as public trust in government has declined. Planning in the United States is constantly reinventing itself. Even the most enduring of planning roles, that of local land-use planner, has evolved as such planners do more and more negotiation over development and more shuttle diplomacy among competing interests. Post-modern planning, however—planning designed to deal with the fragmentation, uncertainty, and rapid change of the early twenty-first century—merges the steps and mixes the roles.
