How to Save Urban America

The political process is the final arbiter. Planning is an aid to that process. Stripped of its technical aspects, planning consists of testing the long-range broad impact of competing interests. The planner attempts to fill a void, to look beyond the immediate effect of public and corporate policies.

How is the planner by virtue of his technical competence endowed more than any other citizen to sense and express the values of all of us? The answer is - he isn’t.

So Regional Plan Association has developed over the past decade a method of citizen participation of which this book is an expression. We have set down the issues - the value issues - on which citizens are the experts, separating them as best we are able from the technical questions on which the technicians are the experts. You, the reader, are asked to make the choices for urban America.

This work represents the distillate ideas of literally thousands of people, those who have taken part in committees and participatory meetings over the past decade, and it represents the input of public and private agency personnel far too numerous to list. The policy guidance of the Association’s Board of Directors is reflected in it, as is the work of staff and consultants who came and went during that decade. Above all, it is the culmination of the faith of the Association’s chairman, Morris D. Crawford, Jr., in citizen participation in planning.

And now what are your choices?

– John P. Keith

President
Regional Plan Association
December 1st, 1972