John Friedmann

Friedmann organised two centuries of planning thought into four traditions — social reform, policy analysis, social learning and social mobilisation — and showed that these are not alternative techniques but different political positions on who decides.

His own proposal was radical planning: instead of advising power, accompanying those outside it. He was also among the first to describe the world hierarchy of cities, a decade before the term «global city» became widespread.

Born in Vienna in 1926 and forced to emigrate to the United States after the Nazi annexation, Friedmann worked as a planner in Brazil, Venezuela, Korea and Chile before founding in 1969 the urban planning programme at the University of California, Los Angeles, which he led for decades. From that experience came Retracking America (1973), where he proposed transactive planning, a dialogue between technical knowledge and the knowledge of those who live the problem, and Planning in the Public Domain (1987), his major work, which orders two centuries of theory into four traditions: social reform, policy analysis, social learning and social mobilisation.

In 1986 he formulated with Goetz Wolff the world city hypothesis, which anticipated Sassen's global city theory, and in Empowerment (1992) he argued for an alternative development based on households and civil society. Critics reproached him for trusting communities too much against the market and the state; his legacy is the now central idea that planning is a political practice and not only a technical one, and the insurgent planning studied by Holston or Miraftab descends from his tradition of social mobilisation.