THE LANGUAGE OF PLANNING: ESSAYS ON THE ORIGINS AND ENDS OF AMERICAN PLANNING THOUGHT

The Language of Planning is a compilation of essays by Albert Guttenberg spanning more than thirty years. In his opening preface, he states that his exploration into the language of planning led him to the discovery that planners are social inventors, ".... experimenters with, and builders of new social forms" (p. xv). For Guttenberg, the planner as a social inventor raises a complementary theme that he addresses throughout the book but does not quite answer until the last essay. Can planning happen in a democratic society where expert intervention can be fundamentally in conflict with the values of common people? To illustrate these issues, the book is divided into two parts: linguistic sources and factors in planning, and planning as social invention. In the opening essay of Part 1, the author relies on the philosophy of language to develop an understanding of planning, stating that to know what one’s intentions are, one must understand the meaning of one’s words. To do this one must investigate the circumstances surrounding these words (p. 5). Terms such as slums, blight, and sprawl, all commonly used in planning, have their meaning attached to the context they represent and actually imply action to rectify the physical conditions. Guttenberg states that "... planning terms direct the imagination along lines favorable to those who produce and define them .... " (p. 9). Thus, our language directs us towards investigations designed, not for discovering some objective state of the environment, but towards some social purpose. Language has two components: a referential component that descriptively identifies an external object or event and a gesture or evaluative component that appraises the object (p. 26). Planning is similar. It has a sense or referential component identified by urban structure theory and an evaluative or gesture component associated with goal theory: "... it not only refers to a system of objects and objective relationships (the city), but it also evaluates these objects and urges people to do something about them" (p. 27). From this linguistic framework, the author creates a land use classification system that is not only referential but also evaluative and prescriptive. The referential mode is descriptive, identifying such elements as type of activity, building type, and economic use. The evaluative or appraisive mode describes the quality of the use such as value, economic durability, and social impact. The prescriptive mode points towards purposeful planning action, for example, identifying uses that might be targeted for rehabilitation. Guttenberg creates this system in one essay and discusses its application to an international classification of uses in a following essay. The two appendices to the book describe referential and prescriptive classification systems. Although these systems are interesting, they lack the detail commonly found in other land use classification systems. Their value, however, is in clarifying the importance of understanding the concepts behind our classification systems, and in emphasizing that systems without a sound conceptual foundation might inadvertently lead us to unintended actions. In the following two essays, the last in Part 1, Guttenberg uses his linguistic analogy to classify regions. Regions are not natural. Regions are created by researchers with specific modes of thought and human purpose (p. 63). Building on his linguistic model, he describes four types of regions based upon purposeful human behavior: referential, appraisive, prescriptive, and optative. Referential regions are the products of scientific inquiry. Thus, there can be regions based on natural physiographic features, or regions based upon economic or sociological characteristics. Appraisive regions are defined by the qualitative language used to identify them. An example of this type of region is Appalachia, which presumes appraisive qualifiers such as gnawing unemployment and wretched social conditions. Combining appraisive qualifiers with intentions to act creates prescriptive regions where there is some implied intention to act, such as an economic development or mosquito abatement district. Finally, an optative region is a spatial entity that expresses a wish or desire or an ideal state. Its objective is to persuade people to act. Guttenberg’s example is the work of John Wesley Powell and others to reorganize the West on a hydrographic basis. Moving from his classification of regions, the author addresses region-making processes. He identifies five processes for delineating a region. The naming of a region, verbalism, implies a second region. For example, identifying a city in a state creates the second referential region, the state. Optative projection, the second region-making process, must begin with prescriptive regions (p. 76) and generates two ideal regions, one that is smaller and another that is larger. Guttenberg illustrates this point by noting that the notion of city has been a prolific projector of idealized regions. Anti-city ideology has generated idealized neighborhood and metropolitan regions. The creation of some optative regions actually creates an inversion, the third process. In these cases a prescriptive region is supplanted by another larger prescriptive region. The development of a metropolitan government supplants the city government within its territorial boundaries. Hypostatic regions are created indirectly when an appraisive region generates another which is assumed to be a real region. In other words, if planners are in the profession of correcting wrongs, there must be something wrong out there to correct, and we create it through research. Thus, this region becomes real when it is only a construct created by the planner. Finally, there can be paradigmatic regional change when one ideal model of a region replaces another. For example, the idea ofa metropoli-