Advocacy Planning

by

Kenneth Reardon, Antonio Raciti

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922481-0080

Introduction

In the post–World War II era, American cities confronted increasing economic, social, and political challenges resulting from the combined impact of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and disinvestment. As growing numbers of large employers seeking less expensive real estate, lower taxes, better transportation access, and relief from unionization pressures moved to the suburbs, many of their middle-and-upper income employees followed them. This outmigration of businesses and residents resulted in growing residential and commercial vacancies and falling property values in many older neighborhoods within America’s central cities causing lenders to avoid investing in these areas. Further complicating these economic challenges was the arrival of increasing numbers of African American families displaced by the mechanization of Southern agriculture. Unable to access expanding employment and housing opportunities in the suburbs due to exclusionary zoning and building codes, these families were frequently forced to live in older urban neighborhoods with poor schools, deteriorating housing, declining retail services, and underfunded municipal services. Inspired by the example of Southern civil rights organizations, leaders from these communities demanded more redistributive urban policies and participatory decision-making processes. In the mid-1960s, the federal government responded to these pressures by increasing funding for public housing and initiating an ambitious “War on Poverty.” Aware of the tendency of federal programs to achieve their redevelopment goals through displacement of the poor, working-class communities of color fought for a meaningful voice in the design and implementation of these programs. In Boston, New York, Chicago, and other US cities, equity-oriented planners and architects began collaborating with leaders of threatened neighborhoods to challenge the assumptions, goals, analysis, and plans of centralized planning and redevelopment agencies. In 1965, Paul Davidoff, an Assistant Professor of Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” which offered a powerful critique of the rational model of comprehensive planning upon which these efforts were based. Davidoff questioned the physical emphasis of these plans, the possibility of value neutral planning, the existence of a unitary public interest, and the ability of a small group of planners to incorporate the interests of diverse communities into a single plan. Davidoff urged equity-minded planners to assist groups overlooked in public planning processes to generate their own empirically based plans designed to challenge the proposals of mainstream planning agencies. Davidoff’s call for advocacy planning led to a significant reform movement within North and South American and European planning that continues to have significant influence within the planning and design professions, municipal planning departments, graduate planning and design schools, and national urban programs in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

Theoretical Foundations

In 1962 Paul Davidoff and Thomas Reiner challenged urban and regional planners’ claims of value-neutrality in the frequently cited article Davidoff and Reiner 1962. In the absence of clearly articulated values, these University of Pennsylvania planning theorists argued that there was no basis for rational choice. Davidoff 1965 builds upon this critique of mainstream planning by questioning the profession’s emphasis on the physical design of the city, pursuit of unitary plans given rapidly diversifying cities, inattention to the needs of marginalized groups, claims of political neutrality, and dependence on municipal planners to identify and evaluate the full range of alternative futures open to local communities. Having raised these concerns, Peattie 1994 subsequently describes the role planners seeking to advance social justice in the city can play in generating plans articulating the hopes and aspirations of groups often overlooked or misinterpreted by planners working for centralized planning agencies, such as: the poor, racial minorities, new immigrants, senior citizens and youth. Davidoff and Davidoff 1971 illustrates the contribution that “advocacy planners” working for poor and minority groups can make toward promoting socially integrated housing and communities. Observing the work of a cross section of advocacy planners in the late 1960s, Kaplan 1969 describes three distinct approaches such planners can take when seeking to amplify the voices of the poor within public planning processes. While celebrating the role robust debate of competing plans can make toward improving the quality of planning decision-making, Mazziotti 1974 notes the uneven nature of citizen organization and power among different groups and the challenge this presents to Davidoff’s concept of advocacy planning. Hoping to establish a standard for evaluating the effectiveness of advocacy planning initiatives, Davidoff 1975 urges planners to consider redistributional justice as this criterion. Marcuse 1976 highlights the role professional ethics that go beyond guild-oriented practitioner concerns to address the broader structural causes of poverty can play in advancing the just city. Documenting the many obstacles advocacy planners faced in the late 1960s, Peattie 1970 asks if advocacy planning is succeeding. Reflecting on more than fifty years of advocacy planning practice, Stramrud 2017 argues for the continuing importance of the redistributive and participatory aspects of advocacy planning given the neo-liberal philosophy and structural adjustment policies contemporary planning practitioners face.

• Davidoff, Paul. “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31.4 (1965): 277–296.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944366508978187

  Presents one of the most important critiques of the rational model of planning. Rejecting “value neutral” planning he challenges professionals to make their political preferences explicit. Acknowledging the increasingly diverse nature of American society, the article advocates for the creation of high-quality plans for the diverse stakeholders’ groups, especially low-income communities residing in mid-20th-century cities. This plea for plans reflecting the aspirations of marginalized communities led to the advocacy planning movement embracing redistributive policies and participatory processes to advance social justice in the city.

• Davidoff, Paul. “Democratic Planning.” Perspecta 11 (1967): 156–159.

  DOI: 10.2307/1566944

  Describes the city planning process as neutral, capable of being used to maintain or challenge the status quo. Argues that planning commissions, dominated by local elites, have tended to promote forms of growth that maintained income, wealth, and power disparities within the city. Invites planners to assist groups whose interests have been historically overlooked to produce high-quality plans that can be presented and debated within comprehensive planning processes that are more fully inclusive.

• Davidoff, Paul. “Working Towards Redistributive Justice.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 41.5 (1975): 317–318.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944367508977676

  Challenges planners to evaluate proposed plans using a redistributional justice standard. It subsequently congratulates the American Institute of Planners for adopting an aspirational standard encouraging planners “to be redistributional in all of their work.” Concludes by recognizing the Cleveland Planning Policy Report as an excellent example of a redistributive plan that sought to expand opportunities for Clevelanders with the fewest resources and choices in housing, transportation, employment, education, health care, and community development.

• Davidoff, Paul, and Linda Davidoff. “Opening the Suburbs: Towards Inclusionary Land Use Controls.” Syracuse Law Review 22.2 (1971): 509–536.

  Describes the role local zoning, subdivision regulations, and building codes play in producing residential segregation by race and class in American suburbs. After reviewing the land use controls most commonly employed to restrict low- and moderate-cost housing and the often overlooked impacts such rules have on economic growth, manpower development, and municipal finances, the authors present seven state policies to encourage more socially integrated forms of housing and development, encouraging officials to pursue these before judicial rulings impose new policies without their consent.

• Davidoff, Paul, and Thomas A. Reiner. “A Choice Theory of Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 28.2 (1962): 103–115.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944366208979427][class:journalArticle

  This article, which appeared three years prior to Davidoff 1965, defines planning as “a process for determining appropriate future action through a sequence of choices.” It emphasizes the critical role values play by providing decision-makers with criteria for making choices regarding the selection of ends, identification of alternative means, and implementation of actions. It also questions the possibility of rational choice in the absence of guiding values and principles in settings where not all elements of the community are represented.

• Kaplan, Marshall. “The Role of the Planner in Urban Areas.” In Citizen Participation in Urban Development: Vol. II—Cases and Programs. Edited by Hans B. C. Spiegel, 255–273. Washington, DC: National Training Laboratory Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1969.

  Presents the strengths and weaknesses of three unique approaches to advocacy planning being practiced in the mid-1960s. These approaches included direct organizing, planning and development assistance provided to grassroots organizations representing low-income communities of color; research, planning, and development support for local governments seeking to improve conditions in low-income communities; and finally, poverty-related research, planning, and policy papers distributed through scholarly and popular outlets without a local community partner/client.

• Marcuse, Peter. “Planning Ethics and Beyond.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 42.3 (1976).

  DOI: 10.1080/01944367608977729

  Highlights the weak role guild-oriented codes of ethics have had within the planning profession. Observing the rapid growth and increasing professionalization of the field, Marcuse challenges the profession to embrace enforceable standards of conduct requiring planners and planning agencies to pursue policies, plans, and projects that address the structural causes of persistent poverty as well as the exclusionary nature of many publicly sponsored planning processes.

• Mazziotti, Daniel F. “The Underlying Assumptions of Advocacy Planning: Pluralism and Reform.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 40.1 (1974): 38–47.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944367408977445

  Highlights how robust debate of planning goals, by diverse sets of stakeholders affected by these policies, a hallmark of pluralism, enhances the analysis of existing conditions, broadens the range of solutions considered, and improves the assessment of planning impacts leading to more thoughtful and just policy outcomes. Subsequently highlights the extent to which our political system fails to meet the preconditions for pluralism to function suggesting the need for more radical planning approaches.

• Peattie, Lisa R. “Drama and Advocacy Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 36.6 (1970): 405–410.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944367008977339

  Questions the ability of advocacy planners to devise plans that represents community interests given the increasingly diverse populations comprising metropolitan areas. The author encourages planners to work with specific community-based organizations representing frequently overlooked groups. In doing so, she urges advocacy planners and their community organization partners to consider using large-scale public events, such as theater, capable of calling attention to their concerns while attracting new members and allies to their cause.

• Peattie, Lisa A. “Communities and Interests in Advocacy Planning.” Journal of the American Planning Association 60.2 (1994): 151–153.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944369408975566

  Presents a concise definition of advocacy planning followed by several criticisms of early advocacy planning practice. Among these are advocacy planners’ tendency to: focus on the critique of mainstream planning while offering few policy alternatives; view communities as monolithic rather than diverse; ignore power when discussing implementation; and channel resident action into ineffective hearing processes rather than toward more effective direct action organizing. Peattie urges advocacy planners to engage in “bottom up” planning with citizen groups while also promoting redistributive policies at the municipal and regional scales.

• Stramrud, Lars. “Rational Planning and Advocacy Planning: A Comparative Essay.” Graduate Thesis, Department of Landscape Architecture, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 2017.

  DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23060.55681

  Compares the rational model of planning embedded in the practice of comprehensive planning with the advocacy model of planning represented by resident-generated plans. In the context of contemporary Norwegian planning, being reshaped by neo-liberal policies, Stramrud argues for the importance of redistributive policies and participatory decision-making processes which define advocacy planning as a counterbalance to the hegemonic plans of centralized planning agencies.