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Reading Old Plans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Seymour J. Mandelbaum
Seymour J. Mandelbaum
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

My initial decision to explicate how I read formal planning texts was provoked by the 1988 publication of a scheme for the CBD of Philadelphia and the adjacent residential neighborhoods. I thought initially that I might be able to help people directly read The Plan for Center City. Ultimately, however, I settled on a more modest goal: encouraging a conversation among planners about both reading and writing plans. My contribution to that conversation, an essay entitled “Reading Plans,” started with the notion that a plan, like any other text, creates images of an “ideal” and a “real” author and reader. I went on to explore the ways in which I located myself within and against those images. Once I'd fixed my location, I suggested, I read the core of a plan—whether it was a budget, a simple plat of streets and lots, a formal set of legal rules controlling land use, or an elaborately argued hybrid like The Plan for Center City—in three complementary ways: as a complex set of policy arguments, as an elaboration of a decision opportunity, and as a story.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 5 , Special Issue 1: Urban Public Policy: Historical Modes and Methods , January 1993 , pp. 189 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1993

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References

Notes

1. Philadelphia City Planning Commission, The Plan for Center City (Philadelphia, January 1988)Google Scholar.

2. “Reading Plans,” Journal of the American Planning Association 56 (Summer 1990): 350–56.Google Scholar For a sense of the conversation in which the essay is embedded, see Frascari, Marco, “The Angelic Paradox of Reading Plans,” and my reply, Penn In Ink (Spring 1990): 16–18,Google Scholar a comparable exchange with Tim McGinty in the Spring 1991 issue, p. 7, and the comments elicited by “Reading Plans,” in the Journal of the American Planning Association 56 (Summer 1990): 356–58Google Scholar, and 57 (Winter 1991), 93. Recent essays on the same theme include: Milroy, Beth Moore, “Constructing and Deconstructing Plausibility,” Society and Space 7 (1980): 313–26Google Scholar; Tett, Alison and Wolfe, Jeanne M., “Discourse Analysis and City Plans,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 10 (1991): 195–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Patsy Healy, “The Communicative Work of Development Plans,” a paper presented at the joint conference of the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning, Oxford, July 1991.

3. The imagery is borrowed from Suttles, Gerald D., The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago (Chicago, 1990).Google Scholar

4. “Document No. 72 of the Board of the Department of Public Parks” (1876), reprinted in Fein, Albert, ed., Landscape into Cityscape: Frederick Law Olmsted's Plans for a Greater New York City (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), 349–73.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 351–1.

6. Compare the rhetoric of the innovative judges described in Horowitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977),Google Scholar the analysts of cultural lag in the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York, 1933)Google Scholar, and Schon, Donald A., Beyond the Stable State (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

7. I have elaborated on these issues in “Temporal Conventions in Planning Discourse,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 11 (1984): 5–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See, for example, Cherry, Gordon E., Cities and Plans: The Shaping of Urban Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1988).Google Scholar

9. Rykwert, Joseph, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World (Princeton, 1976; Cambridge, Mass., 1988).Google Scholar

10. Riffatere, Michael, Fictional Truth (Baltimore, 1991), 84–111.Google Scholar

11. Olsen, Donald J., The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, 1986), 219–34.Google Scholar

12. This paragraph cryptically sketches issues that have dominated many discussions of the methods and uses of intellectual history. See, for example, Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983)Google Scholar; and Dunn, John, Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays, 1981–1989 (Princeton, 1989).Google Scholar

13. I have elaborated on these issues in “Open Moral Communities,” Society 26 (November–December 1988): 20–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar