The Planner as Advocate in Plural Planning

Unitary planning is practiced, when one agency prepared comprehensive plan with little or no community or outside input, and without researching viable alternatives. This is non-democratic process in planning. Whereas in other hand, plural planning is completely different than unitary planning, which explores and discuss multiple option for each proposed plan, hearing from different interest groups, giving all groups voice whether they have had traditional power within a community or not.

In plural planning, advocacy is means of professional support for competing claims about way of community’s development. In contrast to above statement, in unitary planning, advocacy is not so important because it does not have any issues, any competition or rivalry from any other private or public agencies. So advocacy is more sustainable in plural planning than in unitary planning.

As legal advocate must argue for his own and his client’s sense of legal propriety or justice, similar to that, the planner as advocate would appeal for his own and his client’s view of the good society. In fact, the advocate planner would be more responsible to his client and express his client views. Importantly, advocate planner would be responsible to his client for preparing plans and foe all of the other elements embracing the planning process.

Advocate planner are accountable to prepare plans that describe the explanation of the arguments made in other plans. Therefore advocate’s plan must have some of the characteristics of a legal brief like documents presenting the facts and reasons for supporting one set of propels and facts and reasons indicating the weakness of counter-proposals. More over advocate planning assist the process of plan evaluation, by making more perceptible the values underlying plans and making definition of social costs and benefits more precise.

Advocate planners also have some educational adversary nature, which made them to inform other groups, including public agencies of the conditions, problems and outlook of the group they represented. They also inform their clients of their rights under planning and renewal laws. Above all advocate’s most important function is to carry out the planning process for the organization and to argue believably in favours of its planning proposals.