ABSTRACT
A key moment in the transformation of the planner from admired reformer to professional came in 1961 and 1962. The planner was being transformed from prophet and reformer into professional. It was an age of expansion of a professional role and self-confidence in it; but it was not to last. The idea of what the planner was supposed to be underwent kaleidoscopic changes in the urban turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In some universities, urban planning departments have been booted out of the architecture schools and into the schools of public administration. It is the failure of futurism and modernism to seize the public imagination, and the failure of a world that encompasses some of the key elements advocated in that older futurist thinking to capture public affection, which creates the cautious environment for today's professional planner.
