ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a small percentage of planning practitioners have acquired such training, whether through university courses, sessions at national planning conferences, or attendance at proprietary short courses and training programs. Postmodern theorists strategies are clearly decentralized, in that the planner is viewed not as a top-down plan-maker but as a facilitator of community-based decision processes. The strategies are also non-rational, in the sense that they rely very little on rational analysis and planning. Most important for planners, the postmodernist view rejects the notion that the major problems of our communities can be resolved through the diligent exercise of rationality-based planning. Postmodern planning theory places particular emphasis on the communicative aspects of planning practice. John Forester is particularly interested in the potential role of mediated negotiation in achieving the sorts of equity-oriented results that he and other communicative action theorists consider most important.
