Tag Archives: Postmodern Planning

Planners Network Disorientation Guide, 2nd Edition

As a member of the Planners Network social media team, I’m stoked to announce that the second edition of the Planners Network Disorientation Guide is now ready and freely accessible at the following link: bit.ly/DisorientationGuide2024. Special thanks goes out to our authors and contributors, our main editor Cara Chellew, and the editorial and design/lay-out team for all their hard work. Finally, it would not have been possible to make this a freely-accessible resource without the ongoing support and contributions of PN members. Not yet a PN member? Join here. 

Description of Guide: What does it mean to be a “progressive” or “radical” planner? And what kind of power do planners have to enact change? The Planners Network Disorientation Guide attempts to orient folks new to the field of urban and regional planning to ideas, concepts, and practices linked to progressive or radical planning traditions. Reimagined 20 years after its first iteration, the Disorientation Guide features a range of articles, interviews, and excerpts sourced from progressive planning academics and practitioners. In addition, the guide includes additional resources with links to grassroots organizations, non-profits, and academic research groups involved in progressive city-building practices. It is our hope that this guide can help to inspire positive ways forward amid present challenges and offer a lens into the kinds of alternative visions and practices that planning can be. Download the guide (PDF) at: http://bit.ly/DisorientationGuide2024.

Please print, share, and distribute!  

What’s Theory Got To Do With It?

Originally written in 2004 in my first year at UCLA Urban Planning, unearthed in my mom’s garage in Montebello in 2019, edited in Pasadena and poolside in Las Vegas in June 2022 and June 2023, final edits in Pasadena in July 2023, and now published as the first entry in my overdue Student Papers Archive series on Medium:

“What’s Theory Got to Do With It? An Examination of the Utility of Planning Theory in Planning Practice.”

Article: https://c1typlann3r.medium.com/planning-theory-and-planning-practice-d4bf60a61146

Modernism vs Postmodernism

I’m revising an early essay I wrote interrogating planning theory in practice. It’ll be the first entry in my Student Papers Archive. I needed to do some background research on the two theories under scrutiny: Rational Planning and Postmodern Planning. In addition to peer reviewed journals from the planning realm, I found this exceptionally helpful chart comparing Modernism and Postmodernism.

From the URL cited on page 2, I noted the author is Professor Martin Irvine at Georgetown. But a copy-paste of the URL didn’t take me to the chart; instead it forwarded me to the professor’s homepage. And I couldn’t find the chart there. The last revision is dated 2012, but this side-by-side certainly is relevant 10 years later — and will remain so.

I want this chart to live on. I don’t know if the host site’s future update(s) will retain it. So much web ephemera is lost without us knowing. So, I’m doing my part by sharing Professor Irvine’s Modernism vs Postmodernism resource here. Researchers, check it out and please be sure to cite the original author if using the chart.