URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / March 2000Fainstein / FEATURED ESSAY FEATURED ESSAY NEW DIRECTIONS IN PLANNING THEORY

urbanism, and the just city. The first type emphasizes the planner’s role in mediating among “stakeholders, ” the second paints a physical picture of a desirable planned city, and the third presents a model of spatial relations based on equity. Differences among the types reflect an enduring tension between a focus on the planning process and an emphasis on desirable out-comes. The author defends the continued use of the just-city model and a modified form of the political economy mode of analysis that underlies it. The past decade has witnessed a reinvigoration of theoretical discussion within the discipline of planning. Inspired by postmodernist cultural critique and by the move among philosophers away from logical positivism toward a substantive concern with ethics and public policy, planning theorists have reframed their debates over methods and programs to encompass issues of discourse and inclusiveness. In the 1970s and 1980s, proponents of positivist scientific analysis battled advocates of materialist political economy. Although the divide between positivists and their opponents persists, other issues have come to define the leading edge of planning theory. Contempo-rary disagreements concern the usefulness of Habermasian communicative rationality, the effect of physical design on social outcomes (an old debate resurfaced), and the potential for stretching a postmarxist political economy approach to encompass a more complex view of social structure and social benefits than was envisioned by materialist analysis. Although discussions of 451 AUTHOR’S NOTE: I thank Frank Fischer for helping me clarify the ideas presented in this arti-cle, even though he is not in full agreement with them, and Norman Fainstein, David Gladstone, Robert Beauregard, and Judith Innes for their comments on earlier drafts