Background: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when city and regional planning became a profession, planners did important work in the realms of public health, fire safety, natural resource conservation, civic and social reform, city efficiency, housing improvements, and city beautification. The founders espoused many bold plans to shape the future of cities. These long-range plans were to be both comprehensive and serve the public interest. Now, planners rarely participate in the dialogue about how cities should be planned and designed. We ceded this ground to architects, geographers, sociologists, urban economists, real estate developers, attorneys, environmentalists, journalists, and others. We are conspicuous by our absence. We seem comfortable generating land use plans for local jurisdictions even though we know that integrated land use and transportation planning is needed at the regional scale. We abandoned health and safety in favor of public welfare. As a result, we embrace weak goals like “livability” and vague slogans like “making great communities happen” instead of addressing public interest dimensions of fundamental importance. We became facilitators of process and experts in public participation. But we are timid to argue persuasively for evidence-based ideas about how to plan places and spaces in the visioning exercises we lead. The American Planning Association’s leadership recognizes these problems and is trying to elevate the importance of the planning enterprise on many fronts. APA seeks to increase the status of the planning profession, assist planners in the trenches, find more effective ways to serve the public interest, and win stronger public and political support for planning. To accomplish these important objectives requires a better understanding of how the planning field became narrow and what can be done to increase its relevance
