ABSTRACT
In 1973, the year in which I first studied a module in urban planning (with Derek Diamond at the London School of Economics), David Eversley1 wrote The Planner in Society: The Changing Role of a Profession.2 Eversley began his book by announcing that British town planning faced a crossroads, repeating the metaphor invoked by Lewis Keeble in 1961. Eversley described a crossroads at which planners had a choice of paths:
Straight ahead, perhaps, he (sic) can plod on with what he has been doing, and probably doing conscientiously enough: administering the law of the land. To one side: an abyss, a total disgrace, an abdication from social responsibility, the planner at the bottom of the heap and the scapegoat for all the evils of society. But in other directions, the road points to the possibility that the planner may be on the brink of greatness: a long, hard climb, not to a height where his judgment is unassailable, and not so far removed from the realities of the urban scene that he need no longer communicate. (1973: 304)
Besides there being far more women planners and those from minority ethnic backgrounds than in Eversley’s day, can we tell which path planners have taken since 1973? Clearly, many have chosen to ‘plod on’; a few may have fallen into the abyss (as authors such as Jon Gower Davis (1974) and Peter Hall (1982) describe); and a few may have achieved Eversley’s ‘greatness’ (such as Pierre Clavel and
Norman Krumholz in the US).3 But this is to exclude other definitions of ‘greatness’, non-Western planning and planners and, in particular, the role of planning theory.
