ABSTRACT
The role of the professional planner, then, is to facilitate decision-making by the citizenry. The planner should be able to engage in the political process as an advocate "of the interests both of government and of such other groups, organizations, or individuals who are concerned with proposing policies for the development of the community". Paul Davidoff himself may have been loyal to the concept of rationality, but most of those who actually functioned as advocates were more likely to view a plan simply as one of many tools available to the advocate in the pursuit of what are right. The advocacy planning initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s were often transformed into social protests, community organizing efforts, and other forms of political activism, with relatively little emphasis on the development of plans per se. The strategies examined under the "decentralized" heading, on the other hand, generally assume that major decisions should be in the hands of the citizenry itself.
