Keynote Speaker - Mr. Wight

It's really nice to be in Nova Scotia and not have to worry about having to have a translator. Sometimes my accent can get a bit thick but I'm assuming Nova Scotians should understand it. I should also say welcome to the conspiracy and "do you feel conspiratorial today?" I'm referring to George Bamich Shaw when he talks about all professions are conspiracy against the laity. I hope I'm not guilty of conspiring in that direction. The other one that I always think about when I hear professions mentioned is Ivan Eilicht. He really shakes up professionals in a book called "Disabling Professions". Again, I hope that we're not in that business - we are in the business of enabling. Those are just some opening points that I immediately thought about when I heard about this assignment. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to speak on this subject - it's one close to myheart. It's one I visited recently in terms of the planning professionalism issue of Plan Canada. There's one article in there by Nancy Marshall where she talks about not so much professionalism as professionalization. I wanted to spend some time visiting it.

First of all, I wanted to give you my take on where I see you folks are and just briefly read and then try to depart from these notes. My take on what you're doing at this conference is, the way I see it, professing planning. I'm a professor of planning, you're a professor of planning as well in my book. Professional planning has never been more challenging, whether we're negotiating a global local crossroads or straddling the post-modern divide. Planners must decide where and how to best position themselves for personal integrity, but also for professional validity. That's what you're engaged in here and you've come up with the notion of "is it education for the person and legislation for the profession". Will these deliver the basis for a serviceable planning professionalism that is up to those challenges or is there more to it? My presentation will attempt to spark some useful discussion on these fronts at what seems to be a rather officious time in the Atlantic provinces. I'm very interested in what you're doing here - to the extent that your project is definitely one of unselfish professional development and active personal professional development that's genuinely in the public interest and for the public good. I'm certainly going to commend you for actively engaging these issues at this time but to the extent that your motives are, otherwise I might be inclined to condemn rather than commend.

There's a bit of an ethical issue here. The way I see it, our common ground is what I call planning in the public domain. I should declare that bias straightaway. I teach in a public domain planning school - I don't teach in a management school where you might get more corporate planning. This common ground - planning in the public domain, the way I put it, can be essensed, to get at the essence of it in many ways. The one I like best right now is this notion that this year planning has essentially been a case of ethical inquiry in action. I'm borrowing here from this lady, Leona Sandracock, who I use to open up the planning profession as an issue. She is one of the brightest luminaries in the field right now. She's now in Australia but she's spent a lot of time in the US. She started to get read very widely for her book "Towards Cosmopolis" and this is her take on planning. It's essentially about ethical inquiry in action. I'm suggesting that the planning you engage in here, ie., in developing your profession and your person, be conducted consciously as an exercise in this ethical inquiry in action. I see that as a manifestation of our truly traditional practices convictions, PRAXIS, which is a lot more than just practicing planning. This PRAXIS for me is the kind of model high ground that kicks in when our conscience kicks in; it's when our passion about planning is purring, it's when our bliss around what we do is blossoming. I say that just wondering if you really have a feeling of passion for what you do and that you feel you have achieved your bliss by the profession you're in, cause if not, there's probably a disjunction straight away. We could talk about that in connection with a more generic professionalism. I was going to spend some time on the work of David Maester who writes about true professionalism. He never mentions legislation and hardly mentions education in the formal term. Again, it boils down to a matter of attitude, especially your attitude about caring. It's almost getting yourself into that mind space that I'm hoping you can get into to really debate this issue. Unless you can find into yourself a real passion about what your doing, this is going to be a tough sell. I make this suggestion to actively appeal to your PRAXIS side, knowing full well that your immediate realities may be pulling you in a verydifferent direction, down into what I call the swamp of messy practice. I've been there too in these murky depths with many currents buffeting you around, but the challenges are to stay afloat. You can easily be thrown off balance to the extent compromising your practiced convictions and settling instead for what I call a comparative ethical second best - what I characterize as not practice but PRAGMA. I'm suggesting in your deliberations on the educational climate on the legislating of planning professionalism, monitor your discussions constantly in terms of questioning what's the essence here - is it practice or PRAGMA. I guess I'm also asking you to ask yourself are you really as passionate about this as you should and could be? You'll do more than a check in on your profession - you'll do more of a check in on yourself in the course of these deliberations. So I call my presentation "educating planners and legislating planning professionalism - PRAXIS meets PRAGMA".

You have given yourselves enormous scope, enormous challenge in terms of the scope of what you want to cover. Professionalism, planning, education, and legislation - they are all on your agenda. They are huge topics in themselves and you're also interested in their inter-relationships. Your interest is how they can be operationalized to greater effect in your own provincial back yards. The way I see it, I can't really do justice to such a scope of interest. I'm just going to scratch the surface. I'll give you some personal insights, some observations from my own experience, and hope they'll be informative. I guess I'm going to mainly question, I was actually encouraged by some folks last night through more questions but I hope I give you some resources to help answer them as well. I've circulated a handout of some overheads I'm going to use. I'm doing this partly in hopes they'll help you later on in the round table discussions so that you can do your own doodling on where you want to model things.

I've mainly got something to say about the essence of planning and the notion of planning professionalism. I think we need to spend a little time on that to see if we are on the same page. I've got a resource to try and help run a check on the definition of planning that's at the center of the draft legislation, for example, but also wanted to exercise with you some notions about where the future of planning professionalism is going. As planners, I'm hoping to explore, not where professionalism is right now or where it's been, but we should be trying to project where it's going. I want to open up some points for consideration there.

I don't have too much to say on the legislation side. I'm much happier with the education side of this assignment. The legislation is something I've been involved in in several settings. Right now in Manitoba, we are pursuing the Ontario model. I'm kind of half-hearted that we're just basically replicating it. We are not using it as an opportunity for what I'm urging here which is really engagement of your planning practice and some real engagement of just how passionate are you as a professional. We are kind of going through the motions because we think a few letters will help us, maybe that's where you are. I was in Alberta when we pursued what became the ACP (Alberta Community Planning) planner designation. I don't honestly know if that helped them. I've actually been thinking about this and maybe there's some research that somebody like me could do. Has it made any difference? I haven't seen any research that I can report on. But then I found out, in talking to Don Harrison, that when I was in BC, I actually had a title as well but never noticed it. I never saw my colleagues using it, nobody indoctrinated me into the fact that I could use these extraletters. In their case, a registered planner. So there was an initial like this in BC one time but when I was there a few years after it was introduced, it was not surfacing. I may not say so much about that. I think it's a worthwhile endeavor but within the context of some broader moves which almost involve not so much just our own profession, but we have somehow got to get out into society and get more folks on side with planning. Maybe that's where our energies should be spent.

This is something I use with my students, but before I started teaching this really helped me. It's from John Friedmann's book "Planning in the Public Domain". It was a big planning mini-text of the mid-80's. I don't see this diagram talked about too much but it really is basic to this whole concept. He's still a very influential character in the field. He's getting overtaken by folks like Sandracock. I like this to help convey to students and maybe to you. It all starts here where we're all involved in a system which if you maintain, sometimes changes, sometimes gets transformed, and the practice involved in that, some of it is mainly bureaucratic, some of it is political, some of it comes under the heading of what Friedman calls "societal guidance" which I call moving society along in an orderly fashion within established guidelines. You've got a status quo maintenance role and sure enough it's mainly under system maintenance. It's come to really what's called radical planning practice - sometimes called social transformation. I find it important to point out that what is now institutionalized as planning, what has now become statute planning started off as a reform movement and really as a form of relative radical practice of planning. It got institutionalized. Some of us are agents of societal guidance. I think most of us in this room. Some of us are more interested in transforming things - we're not so happy with the status quo. The way it breaks out in terms of different types of planning, some of us are engaged in allocated planning; fairly administrative and bureaucratic. Some of us get more innovative - we stretch more into the system change and a bit of system transformation. Some of us get downright radical. Sometimes I like to say radical is cool. It's not necessarily revolutionary. With that in mind, I'll just ask some questions about your legislation - how does your proposed legislation definition fit in relation to such concepts? Is it open to the full range of sub-category interpretations? Is it designed around one particular category? Is there a subset of bureaucratic practice? Does it anticipate a large dose of political practice or is it effectively limited to low end allocated planning, maybe a dash of innovative planning, but kept away from the undue influence of political practice. If the latter is the case, I'd be concerned because we all know that it's in political practice where most of the planning, for better or worse, is done. It's done by some form of planner, but not by an official planner. A lot of them don't care a lot about their education, credentials, or even if they've got a license. I ask an opening question "Are you defining your planning into a small box or are you open to something

broader, more innovative, something maybe even slightly radical?" That's where I'm coming from in terms of planning.

Let's try and explore what planning professionalism is like. It doesn't really make it into the conference title but it's implicit.

(Referencing Marshall's diagram in her article - Figure 2) This is the one titled "So what's a profession" and then we went on to try and rate how CIP style planning rated overall. I just wanted to make some comment about each of these because I like them obviously. I was happy to see thearticle go in but I think they need to be taken much further if we want to get at the essence of planning professionalism. What you see are the main components identified way back in the 50's by Ernest Greenwood. He did a similar article on professionalism and this is what Nancy was borrowing from and she was picking up on a lot of his cues from back then but I wonder how relevant they are now. Maybe we're still designing our professional development in that old model. I have a hunch that circumstances are changing. You hear this word "post-mortem". I use it kind of carefully. I know that things are different from what I experienced in practice. The label gets applied. I'm not so sure of what it means exactly. I just know something is changing so I'm prepared to admit we might no longer be so much modernizing as post-modernizing. I'm interested in what post-modern professionalism would look like. This is my effort to explore it and I again ask if you've taken it into account. I guess I see you being actively involved in this exercise right now. I interpret it as an exercise in further professionalizing planning, but you're also trying to figure out just what is planning professionalism - how can we carve a distinctive role there.

When we talk about knowledge and theory specific to discipline, all professions worthy of the term expect to have a basis of systematic theory, ie., in Greenwood's terms a system of abstract propositions that describe in general terms the classes of phenomena comprising the profession's focus of interest. Preparation for a profession therefore involves considerable preoccupation with systematic theory. That might have been in the past in your education. This preoccupation with systematic theory is supposed to be a feature virtually absent in the training of the non-professional. It does require intensive educational experience and you appreciate that, you've got it on your agenda. You need that educational experience to require, maintain, and develop the distinctive knowledge base from the anticipated discipline specific theory. It's this which is supposed to distinguish us. It's a professional in the field from the lay person but also from other professionals with other specialties. So, can planners claim a distinctive knowledge theory base? If you recall, that issue of Plan Canada both originally and Nancy Marshall came to the same conclusion which I'll get to. The way Nancy pointed it out, she says that "it isn't very easy convincing us to claim a distinct knowledge theory base". She goes on "we're really in continual internal debate about what planning is, let alone what constitutes its unique theory or knowledge". I've already contributed to that debate with my own take on planning so we're not clear on one theory base, but I don't know if that matters nowadays. I think this mark in our professionalism may not be as important as it was in Greenwood's day. I think it's increasingly difficult especially in the emerging information age to sustain the notion of exclusivity of a profession's particular body of knowledge and I think this is perhaps more obviously the case in fields such as planning where my sense is it's based much more on the realms of an ethic of inter-discipline rather than a single well defined discipline. It's this notion of if we're disciplined, we're a mongrel discipline and we don't have a very good pedigree. So let's make a virtue of that.

In today's post-modern world, it's not so much the possession of a singular knowledge that's important but it's what you do with all the many knowledges that are now being acknowledged. In our conventional professional training, we've been indoctrinated into believing there's only one form of knowledge and that's scientifically certified knowledge and that's one big issue that the post-modernist takes and they try to acknowledge many more forms of those. They're not decrying that scientific knowledge - they're just saying there's a lot more than that and how are we going to dealwith that. We kind of lose some roots but we also gain some opportunities when we broaden it up. So, it's a case of what you do with all the many knowledges that are being acknowledged. I think we've always known that as practitioners. We might not have got it when we were getting our theory but what you do is always context dependent and in our case it's the planning action context and I think Greenwood, this guy who wrote "The Working Professionalism" way back in the 50's, was spared the complexity life talked about in developing his scheme. We should bring it along.

So we are in a context now where planning theory as Nancy puts it "are coming and going like fashion", so there's a lot of flux there. I think it's still possible to think up and cultivate a specific domain for planning. In fact, Sandracock puts this in a way to identify the specificity of this planning domain in such a way that we don't need to worry about if we can declare it redundant every decade. She goes on and she maps out six specific areas. I'll just mention them and call them substantive areas of planing and this is what from an education point of view she would be hoping your planning schools would be teaching in terms of substance. A lot of them are substantive but they involve processes: organization processes; regional, inter-regional, and economic growth and change processes; city building processes; cultural differentiation and change; the transformation of nature; urban politics and empowerment. Those are what I'd call the substantive parts of the specificity that she thinks we need to work on and obviously education has a big part to play. It would be interesting to know how much of the discussion yesterday kind of fitted under those substantive headings. What I'm interested in doing with this is figuring which of the more procedural planning specificities we could nail down much better. It gets me looking at the future like a good planner and trying to look to the future. In this case I'm trying to look to the future of planning professionalism - where it's possibly going rather than where it's been.

Where Greenwood was concerned with establishing a generic professions credentials in terms of a distinct body of systematic theory dictating a distinct knowledge base, I'd suggest planning professionalism should be credited with a procedural specificity that focuses on not so much the knowledge or the theoretical side of things, nor even so much on the action or the practical side of things, but rather I'm suggesting its lay to main claim should be focusing on the linking of the two. Not the knowledge, not the action, but the linking, and that becomes a very important point that I think a lot of us have missed in the past but it's very relevant now because it involves us being much better in the communication arena especially. This linking of knowledge and action, think of yourselves less as planners as linkers of knowledge in action and see how that feels. For me it's where we need special expertise. This is what we should be teaching. This is what we should be getting continuing education on. It focuses on two way communication and a highly transactive mode we know involves mediating tensions - it's just not facilitating meetings. I'm thinking of a linking role that's more than just facilitating - it's actually actively mediating action. There's an agenda there - an intervention agenda. Mediating tensions between the global and the local. We're right in the middle there as well in that linking. We're also, I think by this interpretation, in the business of fostering very rich interpersonal relations and very ideally what we're concerned about is we're involved in the designing of good planning of good places for those relations to occur. Good places where dialogue happens rather than just consultation or formal legislative hearing. I'm also suggesting it involves us being much more heads up about the fact that we're in the business often of managing processes. We want to manage them well - we want to make sure they'reinclusive. Knowledge and theory is not so important as the linking and action that the theory would normally involve. Such a planner is a communicator and a mediator. Planning with books I think is rather removed from a more traditional planner of old or we'll be casting ourselves more as technicians and analysts. We have to at least make that shift and we can do it in a linking way.

Let's move onto the community sanction side. By seeking legislative status you are seeking community sanction in Greenwood's terms. We could say every profession strives to persuade the community to sanction its authority within certain spheres by conferring upon the profession the seeds of powers and privileges. You've got two of them in your themes. The conference agenda is located front and center in this arena - it connects with two very important subcomponents of community sanctions - a piece of the total professionalization picture - that's the interconnection of education and training - you've got that, and right and title to practice - you're certainly pursuing that. This is actually also where the planning practitioner body and the planning academy sort of find common ground. Those two areas serve the interests of each very nicely so we come together on that very well. There is this third subcomponent to community sanctions which sometimes gets forgotten by both parties but really it's the root of the community sanction issue and that's the community's interest - what's in it for the community. This is where the relevance in terms of basic social values in terms of what's good for the community comes into play. Again, I'll ask the question "will this get an airing in your deliberations?" Will it get equal air time? Will the discussion be a testimony to your practice or to your PRAGMA?" How do we make our case to the community - this sanction we seek? I think this is obviously on your minds.

I've come up with another procedural specificity to try and advance our professionalism. It builds on this knowledge action linking I've been talking about and it stresses what I consider to be our underlying - there's an intentionality to everything we do as planners. It's an intentionality in the form of intervention but it's public intervention - it's not private intervention. It's always intervention with a changed disposition. Some of it is just maintaining the status quo - I don't know if we want to talk too much about that but most of it involves at least innovating - doing something new - a changed disposition. Although we've a changed disposition, it's not just any change. I think we have to get this across. The planned intervention must meet "our good for the community test" whereby intervention is interpreted as not just any old intervention but what I call action with vision.

Administrators intervene and act - they don't necessarily act with vision. I think if anything is going to characterize us as planners, we have to always have that connection between action and vision.

I think the other thing that singles us out in this area is the kind of action we are talking about - this collective action. Again, that will distinguish us from a lot of other professions who are worried about what a private individual does by way or action or what a firm does. We're more interested in being part of the action that is collective - that happens and is decided collectively. It can single planning out and planners, if you want. It's one that works for me. I guess I'm suggesting "would it work for you?" This active and dynamic envisioning doesn't seem to be envisaged in Greenwood's day, nor was this collective action context I've been talking about. I think both of these notions - action with vision - collective action interest - they tend to blur rather than mandate a distinction between the professional and the lay person in the planning context between the plannerand the planning. I become a little apprehensive when we talk about not blurring distinctions but making them very clear by certain legislation, so will legislative status help or hinder this take on the community sanction issue, and then what are the training and education implications.

Let's move on quickly to the third point - professional authority, autonomy, and control. This is on the professionalization continue. Each profession has some authority in a particular discipline and gives its members autonomy and control over their professional organization, including control over the organization's information and knowledge base, the research being conducted under its auspices and developing that knowledge base, its membership, its theoretical knowledge through education, right to title and practice granted as members through legal status. That's all Nancy's words. But for Greenwood, his important qualifier is that in terms of individual professionals such authority, autonomy, and control "is not limitless" and any professional person's functional authority "is confined to those specific spheres within which the profession has been educated". He's suggesting by being formally professionalizing can be quite confining and I'm not sure planners want to be confined so often. We're also getting here in this area some signs of the collision between professions seeking status and the education interest in the academy seeking legitimation for a program. I just ask " is this healthy or is it incestuous" or I ask "is it a red herring?" Red's line - his assessment on the planning professionalism issue in Plan Canada, I thought was a very sobering observation. He revisited some of these topics in a little more detail than I have but his conclusion was the planning profession in Canada has a dubious claim to exclusive knowledge, a diffused body of theory around which there is little consensus or apparent interest, and weak disciplinary processes. Nancy Marshall kind of followed it up with the assessment "the profession is struggling to exert its authority and to manage its autonomy and controls". Should we be depressed or relieved?

Planning in the public domain is not something that can easily be delimited. Remember Greenwood said "it is not limitless". I'm saying the problem with planning is it's not easily delimited. In terms of a particular professions sphere, during the modern period, planning was associated primarily with that part of the public domain known as the state. I think that's where most of us are doing our planning, possibly oblivious to all these other parts of the public domain. I think we could accentuate that if we went too far trying to nail down our piece of the state action in the public domain without first connecting with everybody else. During one period, planning was primarily associated with that part of the public domain known as the "state", which for me has conferred an institutionalized planning system, not necessarily bad but it's been institutionalized wherein this rational comprehensive planning model has often been given pretty specific legislative backing, especially in our provincial statutes, at least within the sphere of land use change. That's where we start to get pretty specific in our statutory area. I would suggest more recently, planning in the public domain has embraced that part known as the economy or the market place. Here we get involved in more ad hoc, less "statutory" initiatives. We don't have legislation in terms of planning legislation that we work within so much but we're engaged in other things other than formal plan making -we're engaged in private/public partnerships and all manner of variations of that alternative service delivery or versions of privatization. When we're involved in that, we're really operating in a different part with the public domain. I want to suggest there have always been two other arenas of the public domain where this professional planning has been weak or non-existent or was actively resisted in getting engaged with it as planners. This is civil society and the political community. I'd say this needs to change or planning will continue to attract poor reviews from within and without. How can I be constructive here? Another enabling procedure specificity should be our disposition. We love that word in the planning definition. I'm just playing with it a little bit more. The disposition of planning to conscientiously serve all parts of the public domain, while privileging none. Think about attempting to approach planning in that sense rather than just within a matter of a piece of one of them like the state and things start to open up. Planners successfully straddling the four parts of the public domain will gain a legitimacy and a credibility. Perhaps given that, you should be relieved at what Laing and Marshall were saying in this disparaging assessment and we should be looking at ways to make even more virtue of them. It's a tougher point to sell but I think one of the things we need to do as a profession is also see ourselves as being part of civil society and be much active there within the profession. We have to find a way of engaging there. Maybe that's something some of us individually would do in our off time but this is maybe where a lot of our planning commissioners are located - in the political community. There's just a couple of examples of how we could be broadening our appreciation of this lack of public domain in which we do our planning. Let's get back to this one.

This code of ethics business and for good public relations, at the very least, it seems our profession needs to be able to show off a code of ethics and most professions have codes of ethics which deal with two main areas - client professional relationship and a colleague to colleague relationship. The existence of the code can be interpreted as indirectly addressing the more general relationship between the profession and the public - so that's good. The codes are not normally well developed in explicitly laying out the terms of such relationships. Nor do they elaborate for me well on broader concerns such as right now in the realms of environmental ethics. I have to say too that the client focus and its inner code of ethics for the CIP one as well, can be especially disconcerting, especially when I talk about us planning in the public domain. Jane Jacobs calls it the guardian syndrome rather than the commercial syndrome. The client focus especially can be diverting to say the least in the planning context. It cannot in Jane Jacob's terms. I'm talking about her book "Systems of Survival" which again we've had a review of in the planning professionalism issue of that book. I feel it's got tremendous value within planning if you want to learn about the challenges you face, especially now that we are often flitting between the two basic survival systems she's talking about. The systems are the commerce syndrome - clients. That's what I'm worried about when I see client language in comparison to what I think would be regarded as our more natural syndrome, namely on the guardian side of things. I see that as our home base for the public domain planning. I would think a planning code of ethics would deal with this head on and leave us and the wider public and no doubt that we be guardian professionals rather than professional commercials. And that again gets at my PRAXIS - PRAGMA challenge. Maybe I'm being rather idealistic in terms of hoping we can be purer guardian professionals but I do see a lot of what I call professional commercials out there which are operating mostly what I feel. Yes, there's a high level of practice going on but deep down a lot of PRAGMA.

As Marshall notes, CIP has a statement of values and a code of professional conduct. Together we can read them as a code of ethics, however, she questions their ethicsy. She doubts that planners actively use them, refer to them, or alter their behavior because of them. Are they simply a form of window dressing for those on the outside looking in on the profession? Are we well served by anethical code that is driven by underlying commercial rather than guardian considerations? Again, we may need to rethink an important aspect of our professionalism - another procedural specificity. Rather than a half baked code of ethics, mainly for others benefit, this advance I'm talking about could take the form of a broader serviceable ethic, constantly and consciously dragging our knowledge, action linking. I'm thinking here of the constant conscious meshing of three critical dimensions of a well evolved planning persona. I'm taking three dimensions from again Friedman. If it's not obvious by now, I'm a Friedmannist, if you're going to label me. I just love the way he moves along with the times although some folks just remember the old 1960s Friedmann - he's come a long way from then. He was given the distinguished planning educator award in 1989 by his peers. In his kind of speech he pointed out these three dimensions of the planning persona - there's the technical, the moral, and there's the utopian, and we need to operate in all dimensions at all times. But, I think it's sometimes a case of how often we get lost in that first - the technical, and we forget the rest. It's sometimes too easy for us to define planning in mainly technical means terms. We get ourselves that way safe distance from the ends in their deliberation. Sometimes we can be seduced by the notion that the process of planning is a sufficient and legitimate end in itself and this short-circuits the moral utopian reflection on what is societally desirable and I'm adding also and what is ecologically imperative alternative ends. We are not necessarily getting at that kind of deliberation if we just exercise the technical part of our personas. I'd suggest that planners are mainly in the knowledge action linking business at a practical level. We're linking, meshing, we're straddling -we've got to be comfortable straddling. To succeed in these businesses, we need to be planning on all three of those cylinders - the technical, the moral, and the utopian at all times and for me this adds up to a fundamental sort of goes without saying ethic and it possibly needs to take precedence in this post-modernizing profession - professionalism context. They're really out there for other benefits.

Lastly, socialization and culture. I think this is the big one. The final plaque is best exemplified by what you're engaging in right now - hanging out with fellow professionals in a concerted act of making or remaking the culture you together constitute. It's what I see you doing - socializing. We're doing culture right here now. A profession and a professional need to make time for active development of professional culture. That's why I commend you for what you're doing. How do we do those things? Again as Nancy Marshall was noting "contemporary professionalization of careers are where professionals are educated - in the schools and colleges, where they work, private sector, public sector, non-profits, where professionals promote a group interest in associations like yours." A great deal of socialization occurs comparatively informally amongst clusters or cliques of colleagues often based on areas of specialization, geographic, and personalities. Maybe there's cliques of provincial planners or consulting planners or Cape Breton planners - I think that's what sociologists are getting at and I think the sociologists have got it right, right now - this is what I'm seeing and I think we can feel good on this last one at least but what I worry about is if we are flawed on the other kinds of professionalization. Perhaps realistically we're still more of an occupational group than a full fledged profession, no matter how strong our current socializing, how rich our inter-personal culture. Now I'm prepared to acknowledge that Atlantic Province folks are a special breed when it comes to socializing. But I do often wonder how strong is our socialization in the planning professionalism term across Canada. How fair is our professional culture at these higher levels? How many in our membership are dedicated devourers of Plan Canada or our affiliate magazines or newsletters? How many enthusiastically attend annual conferences? How many areactively involved as volunteers? I'd venture a guess that we're talking about a minority in each case and perhaps an embarrassingly small minority in some cases. What does this say to a community whose sanction you might be seeking in terms of some privileged legislative rights? If we are not enthusiastic about our profession, why should others enthusiastically back us to the extent of giving us our own legislation? Why should they want to depend on us and entrust us to plan with them?

I think this whole issue of socialization of professional culture needs to be radically rethought, especially as far as planning in the public domain is concerned. We need to be comfortable with the public good and much more enthusiastic about our vocation as educators of, as advocates of, as crusaders for, the kind of planning in terms of the substantive, and procedural specificities I mentioned earlier. That's what we have to be in the business of. I do worry about seeking legislated sanctions first which could actually be inconsistent with what I call such necessities. The socialization and culture, it would be important as a profession though as far as I can see, it would be a much broader socialization and a culturization of society to the kind of post-modernized planning I've been attempting to tease out in my discussion. This is planning as social learning, which is very different from the blueprint or the engineering model that a lot of us got in our earlier training. It's planning that's aimed at empowering rather than disabling. It's a planning that's aimed at conducing inter-dependence rather than the dependence of the public on us experts. I would say it's a planning that has got over its planning for hang-up. It has perfected its planning with disposition and ideally it would be a planning where planners would feel good enough in their skin to actually contemplate a flood of evolution. I think mostly we're now planning with. Most of us are comfortable with that but can you contemplate a further step to planning by and how would you place yourselves as professionals then? How would you rethink that? It's a tougher one but I think it's a necessary one, especially in a democratizing society context but try and actually contemplate a further evolution technique like planning by folks themselves. Where do we vent standards for professionals? I think professional expertise is still essential in that highly evolved planning society. It's more a case that a professional is more on tap rather than on top - that we're not necessarily up there on our expert pedestal all the time - we're down in the swamp with folks - down in the pit. I would suggest that that's the necessary professional education for this eventuality and that should be mostly exercising us right now and within that, once we get that sorted out, I think we can look at legislating in some specific areas.

(Referencing Page 3 of the handout) This is the environmental design discipline in the Prairie provinces. They were surveyed by a couple of my colleagues in Manitoba recently and they developed some models that I think have application to you folks as long as you're prepared to adapt them for your circumstances. This is based on the environmental design disciplines in the three Prairie provinces in the early 90's. That includes architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, and planning. These results reflect that. I think it was mainly precipitated by concerns in the Prairies at that time by the architects who were worried they were going to lose their legislated scope of practice and they wanted to check up on what their membership was doing. Actually, I think they retained the legislation but they have really re-doubled their efforts in the education field. They've gone to continuing education especially in Manitoba which is leading the Prairie provinces. They are also thinking about this kind of model for remodeling their individual profession.

What they are talking about as a suggested model is this idea of getting rid of non-members, and moving graduates as soon as they graduate into the membership. Students are considered somewhere along the full category and we've got this illusion of a non-member site, we're open to specialist with that and that's where I think there's opportunity to license specialist practice. At the same time in Manitoba there was a law reform commission reporting on their registration and licensing of professionals. They were actually talking about being very chintzy. They recommended to the government that they use licensing and certification legislation very sparingly and only where it could be justified. Not whether it could be justified in terms of broad applications like planning, but particular tasks or services within in it and giving certificates of practice. This gives us an idea -I can sense in some of the material I've seen there may be a constituency here for building this kind of broader arrangement within which to pursue some of the licensing or registration. I think you might want to do some doodling on your own model there.

(Referencing Page 5 of the handout) There's some voluntary connection between them but mostly legislative barriers. It includes us as planners in their model. We could also be thinking about this in terms of how we can bring in more interest. Values come down but also we open up to related disciplines rather than worry about trying to cut ourselves off. There's another model there that you can play with - the Prairie experience.

Education is evolving. This was a very neat summary that I shared with you in a handout. A characterization of planning education when I was going through the system. This gives you a feeling from where we've come as a profession. Yes, it's mainly US stuff but it gives you a sense of all the influences that have been at work, especially early in the century, we were very architectural, we were very engineering - that's our roots. It got translated into planning terms actually more as civic design - a very strong design element to our profession in the early days -actually before we were often formally professionalized before we got institutionalized with Planning Acts and the like. The knock then on education was yes - it was practice but it was without theory. Then post-war along comes lots of social scientists and they did their thing so we now get some knowledge in here - some theory - but the knock there was that it was without relevance. The current knock is that with all the post-modernizing, we're getting criticism without engagement.

I'll just quickly highlight some of the things said by Linda Dalton, speaking at the Associate of Collegiate Schools of Planning in Chicago last week. She tried to identify where the future might go in terms of planning education. I just want to highlight some of them. The current methods of computer applications. Yes, planning education should be working in this area but in terms of planning support systems. Yes, social sciences, we still have room for them, but their research needs to be more focused on effective intervention by the planning profession. That involves much more collaboration between practitioners and the researchers. She's highlighted that even more than this. She's not sure where public policy will go. She mentions transportation planning - she sees that as a continuing influence. Land use, our traditional base, is still there. Civic design is still there but is kind of in the urbanism. Public policy, there will still be that strength. Environment will be the sustainable development, so we have to have this in our program as well. Notice fiscal self-sufficiency is coming into play. We have to get that into our education. In terms of the general area down here, the more activist area, we have to concentrate on practiced behavior. It's almost gettinginto the sociology of finding practice and being a therapist to help folks through the various difficulties. It could be that we move along those lines so that we all have more positive mental attitudes. Ethical responsibility is where constructive post-modernists can make the biggest contributions. I'm trying to be a constructive post-modernist. She actually chastised the planning academy for spending little time thinking about future change in planning and we have to add that in. That tells you where they are going down south.

You also have in your package a questionnaire template which might help you later when you're surveying the situation in your field. This work has been published in our planning academics magazine called the Journal of Planning Education and Research. The people who have authored this have followed it up with a public report at last weeks conference. They compared their Oregon southwest Washington situation with four other states - New Jersey, Florida, Maryland and California, and found vindication for the general results you see summarized here. You can study that at your leisure but the highlights we are basically pointing out is that there's a tremendous value - these were planning managers who were hired as entry level planners. They knew the folks they were hiring would not necessarily have planning experience so the interest of the research was what their education program had given them. I have to say it's maybe a skewed sample because they tried to get more than just the public sector and didn't succeed. This is biased on public sector planning managers. They are stressing communication skills; people skills; analytical skills; and technical skills are there but not up there when given a choice. When they are promoting people, it's on those basis. The comment was made by students at one of the tables yesterday that they're not getting the training geared towards communications. That is something we definitely need to talk about and try to correct. It also says something about analytical and technical skills - they are the easiest things to think about defining and legislating, whereas those more general people skills and communication skills - what I call linking of knowledge and action - they're a little more genetic but we need to combine them, otherwise people will just hire masters of communication. Obviously we've got to combine the two in that linking. Oregon within the US has one of the most intentional planning systems - they are considered the more progressive among the American states. The folks who wrote this were wanting to check to see if that was still the case. They were also wanting to check to see if they could do their job better and yes they were getting signs they had to do more communicative theory. In the planning academic right now the rage is something called communicative action theory. In a way I've been modeling it a little bit but certainly when I stress this linking that's where the communicative action comes in. In terms of where education occurs, you've got to be looking for more opportunities for it to occur outside the university in practice settings and we are getting a lot of discussions on the importance of internships, actual planning experiences beyond the classroom. I think we do a pretty good job of that in most Canadian programs. It sounds like they weren't so far advanced in those directions in a lot of American programs, especially in the Ivy league programs.

(Referencing an overhead) Again, you don't have this sheet but it puts in words some of the things prioritized by the respondents. In order of priority, the top five skills in competencies in entry level planners are: people skills; attitude; basic stuff like writing and public speaking; analysis; and other experiences, values, visions and goals. I think you can see from the way I've presented it, we've got to somehow have the passion for what we're doing or we're lost.

Finally on the education front, this again is not in your handout but just to give you an opportunity to start doodling - this again is in the environmental design study context in the Prairies. They were concerned there was no justification on the architect and landscape architect or the length of education that was required to become a practicing architect. Maybe the same thing applies in planning. We should be mainly practicing those people skills. I'm teaching in a graduate program. A four year undergraduate has picked up a fair amount of analytical skills but might not have the technical skills. Maybe we don't need to spend so much time on that as on the communication skills.

Then it's a question of what you do afterwards. We haven't really talked about the continuing education component. I found out that the AICP in the US, at their next meeting in New York in April, have on the table a mandatory continuing education policy to maintain an AICP status. That's the first time that it's been really raised and it looks like something is going to go through there. They could not give me any details but I found it very interesting that they are moving on it and chances are we in Canada will have to think about it sooner or later. Right now we just do it on a voluntary basis in CIP. I have sympathy with that approach, especially when we see who gets the credits on a regular basis and gets published. If I was hiring somebody, I'd take notice of that honor role - folks who have voluntarily gone through that continuing development. The Americans are talking about mandating it. I know the architects in Manitoba do it. They have to turn up to at least three or five weekend course offerings in any given year to maintain their status. These would be on things like ethics; some of them are on things like building envelopes. The Australians do this -I think it's semi-voluntary. They have to put in 30 hours and they can get those hours by maybe attending maybe 50 hours of conference sessions. Whether or not you contemplate legislation, I think we have to contemplate doing something with continuing education on the part of professional development.

Atlantic Planners Institute

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This document was last modified on January 11, 2000.