ABSTRACT
My “bias for practice” has led me to ask how planners can work in politically realistic and ethically progressive ways. That bias presumes that we can learn from planning and related practices that have effectively engaged power and confl ict, bureaucratic challenges, racial and gender exclusions, and more. 1 So I have watched, worked with, and interviewed fascinating and creative planning practitioners, less because they seemed either just typical or magical exceptions than because I wondered how we might learn from practice about better planning. Here I reconstruct the intellectual path I’ve called a “critical pragmatism” to try to encourage more responsive, expert, and creative planning practices.
