My 60 Years as a Planner

Abstract

This article is a continuation of JAPA’s “Perspective” series that provides a view of the 60-year career of Richard S. Bolan. In those 60 years Bolan experienced four different career phases beginning with eight years of practice experience, followed by a period at the former Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. From there he joined the faculty of Boston College, where he published numerous contributions to planning theory. In 1985 he moved to the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, where he engaged in international work focusing on Central and Eastern Europe and wrote about the failed role of planning in the fall of communism and essential works in environmental remedial work for an extremely polluted region. He has continued teaching since officially retiring in 1988 with current responsibilities teaching planning theory at the doctoral level. He has just completed a book being considered for publication, titled Urban Planning's Philosophical Entanglements: The Rugged Dialectical Path from Knowledge to Action.

Acknowledgments

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the people in my life without whom my career might have been very different. My very first boss, Don Graham, pushed me to high levels of responsibility only three years after getting my MCP degree. At Boston College, Ed Burke, Fred Ahearn, Vic Capoccia, and Ron Nuttall were first-rate intellectual colleagues, along with members of the university's Philosophy Department, Bill Richardson and David Rasmussen. At NYU, I worked closely with David Farley (who later moved to the planning faculty at McGill University in Montreal). At the University of Minnesota, David Hollister and Rama Pandy encouraged me to think and work globally. At the Humphrey Institute, first-rate colleagues were David Pitt, John Brandl, John Bryson, and Bob Einsweiler. Finally, teamwork with Zbigniev Bochniarz guaranteed a very successful, rewarding period in my life. Zbig is a tireless, energetic intellectual working at any time of the day or night. I was very lucky to work with him in the period of international upheaval of the communist dictatorships.

Notes

1. Later, to my chagrin, after I had left the BRA and during the implementation phase of the South End renewal project, gentrification began taking place in very strong fashion.

2. For excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report, see https//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_Commission. Commission members included Otto Kerner, governor of Illinois; John Lindsay, mayor of New York; and Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP.

3. My hobby outside of planning is playing jazz piano. This activity dramatically portrays the strong, essential relationship between theory and performance.

4. I especially thank Bill Richardson and David Rasmussen. Also at Boston College, I was privileged to meet visiting European scholars such as Jurgen Habermas and Hans-George Gadamer. Most planning theorists have read Habermas, but I was lucky enough to attend a seminar he offered at Boston College.

5. Interestingly, I was in Bratislava at the time of the movement to separate Slovakia from the Czech Republic. I witnessed a spirited protest action in a park on the Danube River (although I understood very little of what was spoken). Unexpectedly, the Czech prime minister later agreed to a peaceful separation.

6. For a full discussion of the demise of the Soviet Union, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union

7. I also published a philosophically oriented piece about human and environmental relations titled “Saving Time—Losing Ground” (Bolan, 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard S. Bolan

Richard S. Bolan, FAICP ([email protected]), has been an urban planner for 60 years, earning a master's degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1956. He is currently on the faculty of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, where he now serves as professor emeritus. From 1971 to 1975, he served as editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, the predecessor of the Journal of the American Planning Association.