Student Papers Archive
What’s Theory Got to Do With It?
An examination of the utility of planning theory in planning practice.
I wrote the original version of this paper in March 2004 for a graduate course on planning history and theory at UCLA Urban Planning. It has been edited for clarity, with paragraphs added defining Rational Planning and Postmodern Planning, and published here as part of my Student Papers Archive series.
Urban planning students learn that planning theories provide precise conceptual principles for practicing planners, that planning paradigms guide practitioners’ decision-making methods, and that planning traditions are unions of theory and practice. Strict conformance to a particular paradigm might be possible in an allied discipline like architecture, where an architect who ascribes to, say, Modernism, creates distinctly Modernist buildings. For urban planners, however, theories and paradigms are not the all-or-nothing philosophical categories that students are taught to believe. Rather than conforming to a single ideology, urban planners typically draw from multiple theories in their professional practice.
For this assessment, I interviewed Bill Braxton¹, Planning Commissioner for the City of Monterey Park, CA, to understand how theory bears on his day-to-day…
