City planners have increasingly come to interpret their mandate as a broad demand for social planning. In response to the many criticisms of master planning and urban renewal design as naive attempts to change society through manipulation of the physical environment, city planners have begun to seek wide training in the social sciences and to produce grand designs for social change. The recent New York Master Plan is an archetypal example. Moreover, the requirements of much federal urban legislation mean that cities must produce plans or forfeit aid.As the breadth of planning increases, as it affects more and more aspects of the urban environment, and as a growing number of cities enact plans of various sorts, it becomes important to understand the political implications of different kinds of planning. While the planner himself may not be a political figure, an enacted urban plan constitutes the substance of a political decision. In Lasswell's terms (1958: 13), it determines who gets what. Thus, even though many aspects of the planning process are technical and &dquo;nonpolitical,&dquo; the way in which a plan is formulated and implemented can be treated in the same terminology as political decision-making. For the purposes of this paper, we shall define planning as futureoriented, public decision-making directed toward attaining specified goals. Although a plan once enacted constitutes a politically determined public policy, it differs from other kinds of political decisions in that it is based on formal rationality and is explicit about ends and means. This is in sharp contrast to many other public decisions which are left purposefully vague and ambiguous so as to mitigate controversy. While a decision need not be labeled a plan in order to fit our definition, political decisions directed at long-term goals are rarely made except under the auspices of a planning group.It is possible to set up a typology of planning methods on the basis of who determines the plan's goals and who determines its means. While one can conceive of a number of different bases for typologies of planning, that of policy determination is politically the most important. For once planning is viewed as a political process, and once a typology is established which is based upon the location of authoritative decision-making, it at DUQUESNE UNIV on July 4, 2015 uar.sagepub.com Downloaded from
The rise of social movements in postwar American cities has been associated with economic reorganization and urban redevelopment. But we argue that although economic change in the cities and social migration motivated by national economic forces provided the objective conditions within which movements arose, specifically political factors were determinative. The first part of this article explores in theory the linkages between economic change and social mobilization. It concludes that urban movements must be under-stood within the context of both routine urban politics and national political events. Using New York City as a case, we go on to show that before and after the national black movement of the 1960s, popular urban protest was commonplace, yet was channeled and contained by the political system. Thus, in recent years, despite enormous economic reorganization and decline in the situation of the lower classes in New York, urban movements have not arisen. Rather, communal protest is isolated, institutionalized in various mechanisms for citizen participation, and results, at best, in a few concessions. The final section of the article assesses the possibilities of social action rooted in urban movements. It argues that only a national movement and political party can establish the context for powerful mobilizations at the urban level.
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