City Planners and Public Service Motivation

Abstract

Once planners came to terms with the futility of being objective technicians, concerns arose regarding how they used their values in practice, particularly within the public sector. This study examines which factors are associated with the public service motivations of city planners in the USA. Variables representing individual characteristics of planners and the nature of their organizations and communities were analyzed in terms of their relationship with three scales measuring public service motivation. Regression results found that different aspects of planners' public service motivations were associated with being female, having different jobs (e.g. current planning, historic preservation), the entrepreneurial nature of their organizations, and the extent to which their citizens verbally bashed government workers. Understanding these factors can help practitioners reflect on how they serve the public.

Hear the Rime of the Fellow Mariner? A Letter to the Next Generation of Emphatic Co-Creators in Planning

“…On the other hand, there is an accompanying discussion on dissonance between planners' institutional roles and their personal values (Campbell & Marshall, 1998, 2002Dalton, 1990;Mayo, 1982;Puustinen, Mäntysalo, Hytönen, & Jarenko, 2017;Zanotto, 2019). However, large-scale and comparative empirical studies on planners' everyday lives remain rare (Birch, 2001;Dalton, 2007;De Leo & Forester, 2017;Fischler, 2000;Forester, 1983Forester, , 1989Forester, , 2012Healey, 1992;Johnson, 2010;Kaufman, 1985;Kaufman & Escuin, 2000;Krumholz & Forester, 1990;Majoor, 2018;Rodriguez & Brown, 2014), including few personal accounts from practitioners themselves (Dalton, 2015;Kitchen, 1997;Tasan-Kok et al, 2016). These studies, especially those developed or inspired by John Forester's pioneering work have done a great deal to gather and tell 'practice stories', illuminating several aspects of complex planning processes, and different everyday planning activities.…”

Shifting Agendas: Private Consultants and Public Planning Policy

“…Despite the significant implications of policy externalization at the local level, there has been comparatively little research on the motivations, practices, and contradictions of private-sector planning firms and their interactions with municipal authorities. Much attention has been paid to the nature of public-sector work, including the political, bureaucratic, and organizational constraints faced by state employees (Healey and Underwood 1978; Howe 1980; Inch 2012; Johnson 2010). However, as McCann (2001, p. 209) has noted, the planning profession is in the midst of political-economic restructuring with “increasing permeability in the institutional boundaries of urban planning, characterized by an ongoing privatization of planning services and outsourcing of its functions to private consultants.” While the study of planning consultants is not as developed as that of public-sector employees, several recent studies have examined the practices of these professionals.…”

“…449–451), there is still relatively little known about the professional actors involved in this restructuring. The substantial and long-standing interest in the work of public-sector employees (e.g., Clifford and Tewdwr-Jones 2013; Howe 1980; Inch 2012; Johnson 2010) has not been similarly developed for private-sector planning consultants, and in some instances, private-sector consultants have been specifically excluded from studies of professional motivations. Consultants are involved in multiple stages of the planning process, including undertaking policy reviews, creating long-range plans and strategies, and designing and implementing public engagement strategies (Loh and Norton 2015; McCann 2001; Momani and Khirfan 2013).…”

The Prospect of Compassionate Planning

“…Third, planners need to manage their own distress tolerance, their ability to encounter and sit with the suffering of others without falling victim to empathy fatigue. The planning literature on burnout—or job (dis)satisfaction in general—is limited (Mayo 1982; Johnson 2010), but encountering distress is a real challenge for many planners. We divide compassion-related practices available to planners into two broad groups: (1) existing practices and resources within the planning field and (2) emerging compassion cultivation programs from other fields that may be valuable for planners.…”