This is a wordle graph of text from the current (2011) APA "What is Planning" web page. (Method: I included text that described planning, and excluded text that (a) described the organization itself and (b) the terms "plan" and its variants "plans", "planners", "planning".) Observations: "Community" (and "communities") is a very common term (far more common than "urban", "city" or "region"). Also frequent are "development", "project" and "program". The terms "sustainable" and "justice" do not appear. "Equitable" appears twice. Overall, the terminology is descriptive, tame and defined by tasks and roles rather than by normative statements about the larger political and social ambitions of planning.

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For comparison, below is a wordle graph of the University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning Program Mission statement (again, I omitted common terms such as plan, planning, planners, Taubman, College, university, Michigan).

back to: Urban Planning 540 syllabus • Prof. Scott Campbell homepage