10.1177/0739456X02238446WatsonThe Practice Movement and Planning Theory Instruction Do We Learn from Planning Practice? The Contribution of the Practice Movement to Planning Theory

There is a growing consensus in planning theory literature that there has been anemergence of a distinct and identifiable approach to the theorizing of planning. Broadly termed the practice movement (Liggett 1996), this new approach is character-ized by the study of individual planners and planning practice: the documentation and analysis of the many and varied activities of planners, their products, their interactions, and their impacts. The assumption is that it is possible to learn from practice to inform practice. This raises some central questions: Can documented accounts of experience contribute to learning? What theoretical and methodological approaches to the understanding of practice can best fulfill its pedagogical potential? and What form can “practice writing ” most usefully take? Different forms of practice writing are evident in recent literature, and this offers an opportunity to assess the usefulness of this kind of work. The article reviews, first, the emergence of the practice movement within planning theory and some of the products to which it has given rise. It then examines some assumptions about learning from practice by drawing on ideas from the fields of expe-riential learning and cognitive psychology. The article draws conclusions about the kind of approaches and textual strategies that can best promote a learning process. The Practice Movement: What Planners Do When They Plan In the 1950s and 1960s, planning theory was dominated by the rational planning model, which was concerned primarily with procedural planning issues. It had origins in writings by Meyerson and Banfield (1955), who in turn were operating within a posi-tivist epistemology (Faludi 1996) rooted in the enlightenment tradition of modernity (Healey 1992b). In keeping with its intellectual informants, the rational planning model assumed that through “the application of scientific knowledge and reason to human affairs, it would be possible to build a better world, in which the sum of huma