Open Collections

Page, Lewis

University of British Columbia

From 1946 to 1956 at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Program of Research and Education in Planning—or the Chicago Planning Program, as its members often called it—operated as a degree-granting program whose faculty aspired to train future urban and regional planners in the social sciences, and also to develop a basic, unified approach to planning. Charles Merriam initially conceived of the program as an extension of the work of the New Deal in 1945. Rexford Tugwell, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters, helmed the program and many of the faculty members had worked in Roosevelt’s federal government. By 1956, however, to both its proponents and detractors, the approach to comprehensive planning developed and promoted in the Chicago Planning Program appeared largely indistinguishable from military operations research techniques. In the furnace of the Chicago Planning Program, New Deal planning was melted down and refashioned in a narrower mold, which redefined planning as the rational direction of a discrete entity towards the future by a group of trained and prudent decision-making experts. In the Chicago Planning Program, parts of the comprehensive approach that Tugwell envisioned, such as the model of Taylorist scientific management, were preserved, while others, such as the hopes of the emergence of a unified and coordinated public, were cast aside. In this way, the story of the Chicago Planning Program shows how trends often attributed to the military research agenda and ideological exigencies of the early Cold War in the United States—from the emergence of “public choice” theory and its critiques of the Keynesian state to the narrowed domain of planning as inappropriate for a state but appropriate for a university or a city—have alternate origins in the continued efforts of former New Deal social scientists to reckon with the project of coordinating the relationship between expert knowledge, the public, and the administrators of the state.

Text

2024-01-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87235

Science and Technology Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/