ABSTRACT
The author was driving down from Boston to New York City with Dick Magidoff, a friend who teaches at a suburban high school near Boston. He was obviously excited as he told the author about an idea he’d been exploring with a group of his students. High school students and suburbia, these things were very far from the author's head. For the past three years he had been an “advocate planner.” That’s the term to describe planners and architects who work directly for the poor, trying to help them plan and design their own neighborhoods. The role of advocate planner for the poor was to help right the balance of planning powers. Advocate planning is founded on the idea of providing adequate representation for all interest groups in decisions which affect their lives. Generating new possibilities for learning places in the suburban situation would expose the problems of the existing schools.
