Planning Experience and Planners’ Ethics

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Ethical considerations are integral to most aspects of planning, but the bases of planners’ ethical decisions are not well understood. In fact, there has been no follow-up to Elizabeth Howe and Jerome Kaufman’s original 1979 survey of the ethics of American planners in this journal (45(3), 243–255). Our research evaluates the differences in planning roles and planners’ ethical perspectives since then. In their study, Howe and Kaufman use hypothetical scenarios to determine which of three roles planners play: technician, politician, or a hybrid. They also evaluate how the role that planners assume affects their ethical views. Our research uses similar scenarios to evaluate these relationships in contemporary planning practice while simultaneously evaluating the influence of professional experience on the ethical bases of those choices. We confirm many of Howe and Kaufman’s findings, but first we find that today’s planners assume different roles than they did in the mid-1970s, conforming more often to a technical role and less to a political or hybrid role. Second, today’s planners tend to make virtue-based choices when concerned with ideological and legal issues, but revert to rule-based or utilitarian choices when faced with the dissemination and quality of information and segments of the population receiving special advantages. Finally, we find that planners, at all stages in their careers, maintain a mixture of virtue- and rule-based ethical choices while affirming the profession’s core values (as represented in the 2009 AICP Code).

Takeaway for practice: The vast majority of practicing planners in our sample (80%) use the AICP Code of Ethics in response to our hypothetical scenarios. At the same time, self-interested responses were rarely made. These findings reaffirm the code’s value to the profession.

Keywords:

• planners’ ethics
• planner’s roles
• ethical frameworks

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. It is important to remember that Howe and Kaufman’s (1979) role scale, like ours, only measures a planner’s attitudes, since respondents were not asked if they possessed the necessary skills for the role. Although planners may aspire to take a political, technical, or a hybrid role, without the necessary skills to perform their duties in a particular role, they will not be successful in assuming that role. This question of the skills necessary to be successful at a particular role is addressed in the interview portion of our research project.

2. Forester’s (1989) construction of the five types of planners (technician, incrementalist, liberal-advocate, structuralist, and progressive) is meant to explain how various planners confront different situations. “Each of these planning perspective points to a different source of the need for information, and thus defines a different basis of power: technical problems, organizational needs, political inequality, system legitimization, or citizen action” (p. 31).

3. Johnson and Gore (2016) compare the historical changes in planning and architecture codes of ethics in terms of the values represented with an eye toward the potential for professional collaboration.

4. The development of many planning organizations gave planning a great sense of a legitimization. In 1959 the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) was born when a few department heads of planning schools got together at the annual ASIP conference to confer on common problems and interests regarding the education of planners (Timeline of American Planning History). In 1971, the American Institute of Planners (AIP) adopted a Code of Ethics for professional planners. The AIP and American Society of Planning Officials (ASPO) merged to become the APA in 1978. At this time, the APA established a professional institute, the AICP, to be responsible for the national certification of professional planners. The ACSP in its current incarnation was established to represent the academic branch of the planning profession in 1980 (Chatterjee, 1986). Prior to the creation of the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) in 1984, the National Education Development Committee (NEDC) had a planning degree recognition program that began in 1960 to assess the qualifications of graduates to take the AIP exam. It was not until 1989 that the PAB was recognized by the Washington-based Council on Post-Secondary Education to be the sole accrediting agency in the field of professional planning education. Following that, PAB started a full-fledged accreditation, involving a much more detailed evaluation.

5. The AICP Code of Ethics is divided into four sections. The first two are of interest here. The first section (A) has the aspirational ethics. Planners are not held to these aspirations as they are to the Rules of Conduct, section (B). These rules are to be closely abided to and planners have the responsibility to follow them; if not, the planner can be charged with misconduct.

6. We also were able to compare our sample data with some incomplete data provided by the APA for 2015. This data is much less comprehensive, so we do not provide it here.

7. There are a varying number of respondents based on particular questions, but the number of missing responses is generally very low. It ranges from 39 for years of experience to 0 on sex. Thus, our sample sizes are still sufficient.

8. While we had expected to be able to test the representative nature of our respondents, to our surprise the APA does not collect demographic data on its members. Thus, we cannot assume our sample is representative of the membership of the APA, let alone professional planners more generally.

9. Our analysis used orthogonal (varimax) with Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy greater than .6 (varying from .616 to .689 for individual runs). All four planning role categories were significant at the .000 level using Bartlett’s Test for Sphericity approximating Chi-Square.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mickey Lauria

Mickey Lauria ([email protected]) is a professor of city and regional planning and director of the Planning, Design, and Built Environment program at Clemson University.

Mellone Long

Mellone Long ([email protected]), AICP, worked as a planner in various capacities for 15 years, is currently an assistant college lecturer in urban studies and planning at Cleveland State University.