The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2003/nc_2003_bengston_001.pdf

Public policies for managing urban growth and protecting open space: policy instruments and lessons learned in the United States

A critical review of seven selected neighborhood sustainability assessment tools

4 This chapter has been allocated 52 template pages, currently it counts 55 pages (excluding this page 5 and the bibliography), so it is 3 pages over target. Reviewers are kindly asked to indicate where the 6 chapter could be shortened. 7

Human Settlements, Infrastructure and Spatial Planning

Open innovation, taken from the fields of business strategy and technology development, can offer planners fresh insights into their own practice. Open innovation, like citizen participation, goes outside the boundaries of the organization to find solutions to problems and to hand ideas off to partners. A key technique for open innovation is “crowdsourcing,” issuing a challenge to a large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new solutions more robust than those found inside the organization. The differences between citizen participation and Internet-based crowdsourcing are discussed. Crowdsourcing case studies are provided as a means for extending an emerging literature.

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Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning

The curriculum for graduate education in planning has been largely dictated by a conception of the planner's role as a technical advisor to decisionmakers. The rational planning model has shaped th...

Taking Our Bearings: Mapping a Relationship Among Planning Practice, Theory, and Education:

Results from an earlier study indicated that senior planners in Oregon and Southwest Washington expect planning graduates to be equipped with strong communicative competencies built on a base of br...

Ethan Seltzer

Papers

Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning

Taking Our Bearings: Mapping a Relationship Among Planning Practice, Theory, and Education:

Clear Signals: Moving on to Planning’s Promise

It’s Not An Experiment: Regional Planning at Metro, 1990 to the Present

Making EcoDistricts Concepts and Methods for Advancing Sustainability in Neighborhoods