In 1979, just a couple of years before I was born, John Friedmann published
what is quite possibly the most exquisite and at once the least well-known of
his 20-some books, The Good Society. Organized around the central question
of “How should we live collectively with one another” (p.3), and concerned
with establishing a moral foundation for planning, The Good Society is an
expression of Friedmann’s utopia.
The book is written in an uncommon format, which Friedmann hoped
would “accommodate the largest number of possible meanings, dramatically
expanding the spectrum of communicable thought” (1979, p.xvi). It consists
of a series of self-contained segments of varying lengths, interspersed with
poems, aphorisms, philosophical paragraphs and other “delights” that are
intended to “illustrate, contradict, confirm, and illuminate the paragraphs in
their immediate vicinity, adding depth and concrete imagery to the more
abstract portions of the text” (ibid.).
This short chapter is written as a partial imitation (the highest form of
flattery) of The Good Society, applying and extending some of the concepts of
that book in light of social planning’s challenges in the 21st century. I write
this chapter as a practitioner of dialogue, as a person who has attempted to
be in dialogue with John for the past eight years, and who has come to love
John in the process. Much like The Good Society, this chapter has “no interest in persuading you, the reader” of any specific argument, but would
instead “like you to think from the trampoline of each paragraph into a
pattern of your own” (ibid., p.xvii).
