ABSTRACT
Town planning has a charter membership in Glazer's society of minor professions. The institutional context of planning practice is notoriously unstable, and there are many contending views of the profession, each of which carries a different image of the planning role and a different picture of the body of useful knowledge. This chapter considers an example of the planning practice, showing how one intermediary planner has evolved knowing-in-practice which enables him to address several issues. A professional role places skeletal demands on a practitioner's behavior, but within these constraints, each individual develops his own way of framing his role. The chapter shows how limits to reflection-in-action are set and maintained. The individual whose practice is a town planner concerned primarily with the physical development of the town he serves. The planner explains how the developer may be able to justify a variance on lot size, ignoring the latter's hint that there may be no need for it.
