Chapter 5: Urban Planning Ethics: Teaching a Practice of Hope

Planning has been described as an “organization of hope.” Even so, the intensification of environmental and urban challenges today has led many planners to experience frustration, disappointment, and even despair. There is a general perception of powerlessness in the planning profession. What can be done to address this predicament in planning? And how might the practice of ethics produce hope? This chapter discusses professional ethics in planning beyond the frame of professional conduct, and underscores the need to reconsider how to teach this subject for the purpose of imbuing hope. Three different pedagogies for teaching professional ethics in planning are described; (1) broadening the scope of professional ethics; (2) empowering planners by expanding their ethical imagination; and, (3) rendering ethics communicative.