function, and to miss the essential point about city planning in this country. I want to indicate a different view of the
city planning phenomenon: that city plan- ning is essentially the same thing as city government, and the kind of city planning you get is largely a matter of the kind of city government you’ve got. I think this is a radically different point
of view from most planning theory which is based upon utopian ideology. From the utopian viewpoint city planning and the city planner are seen as belonging to the city planning ideology or movement rather than to the city of which they are an inte- gral part and whose purposes they serve. It is a view most comfortably held where uto- pian ideology has been transmuted into political ideology, or where planning is taught as moral philosophy or sociological theory. I am not suggesting that city plan- ning as an ideology has no place in the context of other ideologies or theories. On the contrary, that is a point I emphatically want to make. City planning as an ideology belongs in the context of
other ideologies—political, philosophical, sociological, or whatever, and may find a comfortable place among them. I am saying however that as a utopian
ideology it is irrelevant to the city govern- ment function. The city planning function—let me say the municipal plan- ning function—has been performed by municipal governments since municipali- ties were first created in this country, and have done so outside of the context of uto- pian ideology, and independently of planning theory. I am saying that the busi- ness of city government is the conduct of the affairs of the city, and the way in which those civic affairs are conducted will vary from city to city, and will even vary in the same city from time to time, depending on the nature of that city and its incumbent government. And the kind of planning which that city will do will precisely mir- ror the kind of government which that city has. I am saying that city planning cannot have any identity or meaning outside of the context of city government. It is a function of city government
and derives its nature from the nature of that government. I am also saying that the failure to dis-
tinguish between city planning as a utopian ideology and city planning as a city government function makes perhaps the heaviest contribution to the prevailing confusion about the nature and role of planning. [Planning] has become amorphous; it
has lost the narrowness of its definition and the preciseness of its identity. And with this loss it has also lost whatever claim to a “profession” it may have had. But it has also gained something. Through the broadening of its concerns, and the inclu- sion of a whole new spectrum of specialties and interests, including the participation of the citizen at large in what it claims to be “the planning process”, it has identified itself completely with the concerns of gov- ernment, and included in its own ambit all the disciplines and specialties upon which government must now call for advice. In short it has now identified “the planning
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