Three reasons for why the work of public planning professionals is important for all of us.

By Ed Knudson

Smart government requires smart professionals working on behalf of the interests of all the people of society. One of the primary problems with the idea that the market can regulate itself is that it puts the calculation of personal profit at the center of the human consciousness. This leads to big problems in the communty as a whole. It is pubic policy professionals and planners who think in terms of the whole community. Such work has become more and more important as the economy has failed to create the conditions for human flourishing over the past several decades.

So at this website we are especially interested to maintain regular conversation with professionals working in the fields of policy planning, city planning, and related areas. Here are some further thoughts about this.

1. We want planners to feel welcome here and to develop this website as a helpful resource for their work.

Policy Planners, Policy Analysts, Urban Planners function as public professionals at various levels of government, local, state, federal, world. Their counterparts in business may be located in public affairs departments with various job titles. In non-profit organizations they are the people doing research, writing papers, proposing policies and practices for themselves and others.

2. Public professionals have tremendous influence on public policy, on community life, on the direction for the future.

A metropolitan planning agency is thinking ten, twenty, thirty years into the future. What it decides now are the important issues to be addressed, concepts to be utilized, data to be gathered, policies to be used in guiding decision-makers, will have a powerful influence on future quality of life in communities. It is important for all of us to be more aware of what is happening in such agencies.

Politicians listen to their staff. Yes, the rest of us may get excited by the news of the day, who wins and who loses a particular political fight. Politics does matter. But when real decisions are to be made what makes the difference is not just the political context; it is the recommendations made to politicians by public professionals.

3. Policy has to focus on a reasonable level of abstraction.

Thinking makes a difference. The concepts we employ in our thinking determines how we feel and act, how we interpret events and figures of the past, with whom we choose to relate and why.

Political debate often occurs at such high levels of abstraction so far from reality that no matter which side wins a political argument it makes little difference for any particular institutional or community condition. People engage in political fights often for the fun of the game as the media focuses on winners and losers. That's one reason so many people don't care about politics anymore.

Currently the biggest fight is over how to think about economic markets and governmental regulation. In the fight huge generalizations are utilitized, like "capitalism" and "socialism" or "welfare" or "get government off my back" and so forth. The real fight is between governmental and business institutions, of course. The thinking is determined by which of these a person is employed by. This debate is actually now most unhelpful.

What's going on in these debates can be very important, of course. But professionals have to be intentional about the concepts they use as they think about public policy, the use of land, energy production and use, environmental concerns, housing for those who can't afford it, employment, education, security, and all the other matters of concern within communities. Professionals have to think at a level of abstraction which makes sense within the frame of reference and the framework of people and institutions they are addressing. They have to use concepts with which they can design methods to do research and data-gathering to determine what is happening over time and provide accountability for the expenditure of money, time, and energy.

So, the "policy" level of thinking is important. Two persons of good will with very different political philosophies can still come together in a conversation about a specific policy proposal and be very helpful to one another. That, at least, is my own assumption and hope and the reason we here at this website will be trying to involve more and more public policy professionals.