Functions and Roles of Planners

FUNCTIONS AND ROLES OF PLANNERS

1. Professional planner should direct guide and influence the formulation of a plan and exert pressure to gain acceptance and implementation. He is charged with discovery, examining and acting upon the wishes of the local community and translating their dictates into a feasible plan through the
application of professional skills, techniques and judgment. He is therefore – master and servant.

2. The planner is expected to undertake a comprehensive appraisal and detailed analysis of all the problems related to the physical environment. At the same time, he must grapple with transport, housing, education, commerce, recreation and consider them in their economic, social and physical contexts bearing in mind their national and regional as well as local connotations. The planner therefore, is both a generalist and specialist.

3. He is repeatedly confronted with and must reconcile contentious and controversial long-term aspects of planning such as, problems of poverty, deprivation, unemployment with short term financial and political expediency. He is thus asked to provide both social and economic planning expertise.

4. Planners are presumed to possess taste and judgment in aesthetic and environmental matters. He is asked to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences.

WHAT IS AN IMPORTANT SKILL NEEDED BY PLANNERS?

Planners’ accredited skills are that of communication between planner and the planned; the professional and the politician; one department and another; from one seal of operation to another. The planner should be both articulate and esoteric.

WHAT IS THE PLANNING THEORY OF THE 1980’s?

According to Webber’s a Difference Paradigm for Planning – the most commonly accepted notion of planning is that organized societies can rationally and scientifically engineer future history, thus planning should guarantee and ensure that the public interest will be served.

Based on this theory, effective style of planning does not are for plan that present right solutions, rather it calls for procedures which might help plural politics thus, becoming an integral aspect of governing, rather than a separate function of government.

WHAT WERE THE EVOLVING TASKS, ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF
PLANNERS IN THE 80’s

Its special tasks would then be to
• help assure that all parties’ voices are heard
• available evidence, theory and arguments are weighed
• potentially useful options are considered/evaluated
• latent consequence among the many public are identified and assessed

Planners’ role is to debate, rather than to be a substantive expert,
• writer of constitution
• framer of procedural rules that foster
• effective deliberation/argumentation
• planners’ skills are essentially cognitive
• seeks to draw out implications, provokes contention among potentially differing parties
• helps all corners to explore potential consequences and implications
• act as mediator, teacher, inventor

Posted in: EnP Physical Planning,Environmental Planning