What the American Institute of Planners Expects From the National Housing Conference

Planning initiative on the part of individual groups and communities within urban areas has been made necessary by the increasing bureaucratization and technical basis of decisions in current urban society. The efforts of advocate planners to represent these groups are made difficult because of their frequent lack of homogeneity, community feeling, and common interests in action. The treatment of local areas as “communities” of homogeneous interests can result in severe damage to the interest of their weakest inhabitants. Further, it is difficult to draw low-income families into the framework of planning, and to evoke their concern for the planning issues normally posed by the local establishment. Thus it is necessary to carefully generate viable issues in the work and maintain a consciousness of the interrelation of technical and political matters at all levels. The advocate planner's need to evoke and formulate issues maizes him dangerously similar to other manipulators of the poor's interests. One of the most difficult kinds of issues is the type like transportation which, although generated at the community level, must be studied and argued at the metropolitan scale with the consequent loss of a clearly identified client group. Advocacy planning takes many forms depending on its sponsorship. In spite of its problems, it fills a crucial need for managing latent conflict in the cities and for humanizing public action.