Rational Planning Model

The rational planning model is the process of realizing a problem, establishing and evaluating planning criteria, create alternatives, implementing alternatives, and monitoring progress of the alternatives. It is used in designing neighborhoods, cities, and regions. The rational planning model is central in the development of modern urban planning.

Three concepts of rational planning

The rational planning model concepts were created by John Friedmann. Friedmann describes the three concepts of rationality that have informed planning as:

Market rationality

Market rationality is described as being grounded in metaphysics of possessive individualism and which predicates the individual as existing prior to society. Society then becomes the mechanism that enables individuals to pursue their private interests. This prior-to status gives market rationally a quasi-natural character, and ranks it as being beyond human intention, thereby making its assumptions unavoidably compelling. From this perspective, reason is the means toward the maximization of private satisfactions.

ocial rationality

Social rationality is the opposite assumption, that the social group grants the individual their identity through membership in the group. Reason becomes the tool of the collective interest and functions as the avenue toward communal satisfactions.

A third concept

The third concept is a hybrid of the preceding two and seeks some middle ground between them. Friedmann identifies it with the realization on the part of capital that some state sponsored restraint was necessary to curtail the excesses of market rationality and provide for the public good. Friedmann calls this type of rationality social or modern planning. It is explicitly concerned with social outcomes.

Methodology

The three types of rationality that Friedman describes as structuring modern rational planning model are united on their reliance upon the methodology of empirical scientific investigation.

The distinctions that Friedmann makes allows the rational planning model to be used as a tool of social speech that creates it own processes according to the uses to which it is put. The rational planning model acts as a mediator between market and social rationality, and exists between different criteria of what is fundamentally rational.

The rational planning model has its origins in the scientific and philosophic revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries, and in the social revolutions of the Enlightenment which gave public form to urban planning fundamentals and rational worldviews. The profession of modern urban planning is not based on the rational planning model; it identifies what planners have come to identify as rational and have come to an understanding of how the rational planning model affects an urban planner’s decisions. The modern style of urban planning is essentially the rational planning model in its ideological framework.

The rational planning model has also been called the classical rational problem solving process, the rational comprehensive method, the “policy analysis strand of conservative forms of societal guidance planning”, and “the ruling or normal paradigm that governs the practice of modern planning.” Although it has a myriad of names, it has a singular approach to problem solving. This approach is the systematic evaluation of alternative means toward a preferred goal. Once a goal has been selected, the prevailing assumption is that there are only certain correct ways of achieving it.

ix points of rational planning

There are six points to the rational planning model:

Verifying

Verifying, defining & detailing the problem (problem definition, goal definition, information gathering). This step includes recognizing the problem, defining an initial solution, and starting primary analysis. Examples of this are creative devising, creative ideas, inspirations, breakthroughs, and brainstorms.

Establishing evaluative criteria

Evaluative criteria are measurements to determine success and failure of alternatives. This step contains secondary and final analysis along with secondary solutions to the problem. Examples of this are site suitability and site sensitivity analysis.

Identifying alternatives to achieve goals

This step encloses two to three final solutions to the problem and preliminary implementation to the site. Examples of this are Planned Units of Development and downtown revitalizations.

Evaluating alternative policies

This step comprises a final solution and secondary implementation to the site. At this point the process has developed into different strategies of how to apply the solutions to the site.

Implementing the preferred alternative

This step includes final implementation to the site and preliminary monitoring of the outcome and results of the site. This step is the building/renovations part of the process.

Monitoring and evaluating outcomes and results

This step contains the secondary and final monitoring of the outcomes and results of the site. This step takes place over a long period of time.

Current status

While the rational planning model was innovative at its conception, the concepts are controversial and questionable processes today. The rational planning model has fallen out of mass use as of the last decade.

ources

http://ewp.uoregon.edu/pdfs/wp2.pdf

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