John Forester

Forester dismantled the image of the planner as a neutral technician applying criteria. In practice, the planner works surrounded by actors with more power, incomplete information and competing pressures, and their main tool is not the drawing but the conversation.

Hence his idea of deliberative planning: the participatory process is not a legitimation formality but the place where the knowledge the plan needs is produced. And he warns of the opposite: taking part without any power to decide breeds more distrust than not taking part at all.

A professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University for four decades, Forester built his work on a simple observation: planners spend most of their time talking, listening and negotiating, and yet theory treated them as calculators. Planning in the Face of Power (1989) took from Habermas the idea that communication can be distorted by power and showed how an attentive planner can counter it: anticipating who is left out, opening up information, organising deliberation.

The Deliberative Practitioner (1999) and Dealing with Differences (2009) followed that line with real stories of mediators and facilitators in urban conflicts, from land disputes to ethnic confrontations, and founded what is called critical pragmatism in planning. Critics reproach him for optimism about what dialogue can do against unequal interests; his contribution is to have turned the everyday practice of planning into an object of theory and a school of professional ethics.

One of his most practical contributions is the weight he gives to practitioners' own accounts. For years he collected first-person interviews with planners and mediators, published as practice profiles, because he held that more is learned from how someone resolved a specific conflict, with their doubts and mistakes, than from an abstract model. That material is now used in planning education around the world.