John Forester

Bikers and hikers. Sex workers and social conservatives. Agencies and activists. The people involved in planning for a site—or a community—can be like the Hatfields and McCoys. And the process brings them together face to face and toe to toe. How can planners take conflicted communities from passionate demands to practical solutions? Facilitative leadership offers helpful answers. Cornell University’s John Forester has produced a dozen profiles of planning practitioners known for their successes in helping communities turn contentious conflicts into practical consensus. This remarkable book tells their stories in their own words. Lisa Beutler shows the way she got California’s off-highway vehicle users and recreationists on the same track. Michael Hughes shares the search for common ground for HIV prevention in Colorado. Shirley Solomon recalls how lessons learned in South Africa helped her build trust between Native Americans and county officials in the Pacific Northwest. Forester and his panel of experts offer no simplistic formulas but a great deal of practical guidance. From mind mapping to the Hawaiian concept of Ho’ oponopono (making things right), readers will come away with a wealth of ideas they can use to move from the heat of confrontation to the light of creative solutions in their communities.

Conflict, Improvisation, Governance presents a carefully crafted and edited collection of first hand accounts of diverse public sector and non-profit urban practitioners facing the practical challenges of "doing democracy" in the global/local context of the interconnected major European city of Amsterdam and its region. The book examines street level democratic processes through the experiences of planning and city governance practitioners in community development, youth work, public service delivery, urban public administration, immigration and multi-cultural social policy. These profiles and case studies show widely shared challenges in global and local urban environments, and new, "bottom-up," democratic and improvisational strategies that community members and public officials alike can use to make more inclusive, democratic cities.

Conflict, Improvisation, Governance presents a carefully crafted and edited collection of first hand accounts of diverse public sector and non-profit urban practitioners facing the practical challenges of "doing democracy" in the global/local context of the interconnected major European city of Amsterdam and its region. The book examines street level democratic processes through the experiences of planning and city governance practitioners in community development, youth work, public service delivery, urban public administration, immigration and multi-cultural social policy. These profiles and case studies show widely shared challenges in global and local urban environments, and new, "bottom-up," democratic and improvisational strategies that community members and public officials alike can use to make more inclusive, democratic cities.

Bikers and hikers. Sex workers and social conservatives. Agencies and activists. The people involved in planning for a site—or a community—can be like the Hatfields and McCoys. And the process brings them together face to face and toe to toe. How can planners take conflicted communities from passionate demands to practical solutions? Facilitative leadership offers helpful answers. Cornell University’s John Forester has produced a dozen profiles of planning practitioners known for their successes in helping communities turn contentious conflicts into practical consensus. This remarkable book tells their stories in their own words. Lisa Beutler shows the way she got California’s off-highway vehicle users and recreationists on the same track. Michael Hughes shares the search for common ground for HIV prevention in Colorado. Shirley Solomon recalls how lessons learned in South Africa helped her build trust between Native Americans and county officials in the Pacific Northwest. Forester and his panel of experts offer no simplistic formulas but a great deal of practical guidance. From mind mapping to the Hawaiian concept of Ho’ oponopono (making things right), readers will come away with a wealth of ideas they can use to move from the heat of confrontation to the light of creative solutions in their communities.

An updated edition of a classic handbook for cyclists from beginner to expert. Effective Cycling is an essential handbook for cyclists from beginner to expert, whether daily commuters or weekend pleasure trippers. This thoroughly updated seventh edition offers cyclists the information they need for riding a bicycle under all conditions: on congested city streets or winding mountain roads, day or night, rain or shine. It describes the sheer physical joy of cycling and provides the nuts-and-bolts details of how to choose a bicycle, maintain it, and use it in the most efficient manner. Effective Cycling covers the bicycle itself, repairs and maintenance, basic and advanced cycling skills, and how traffic is organized. It describes cycling with friends, bicycle tours, increasing physical endurance, racing, and even finding a cyclist as marriage partner. Throughout, author John Forester emphasizes that cyclists should consider themselves drivers of vehicles in traffic. That means obeying the rules of the road, because when all drivers obey the same rules, they don't have collisions. Forester explains why cyclists should not be afraid to cycle in traffic, and he urges them to resist being shunted off into government-sponsored bike paths as if they were incompetent children. Cyclists fare best, he says, when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles. Effective Cycling will help owners of bicycles dusty from disuse become active cyclists and veteran cyclists improve their techniques and achieve their cycling goals. Each section moves from basic to advanced topics; readers are encouraged get on a bicycle and practice each activity after reading about it.

Conflict and dispute pervade political and policy discussions. Moreover, unequal power relations tend to heighten levels of conflict. In this context of contention, figuring out ways to accommodate others and reach solutions that are agreeable to all is a perennial challenge for activists, politicians, planners, and policymakers. John Forester is one of America's eminent scholars of progressive planning and dispute resolution in the policy arena, and in Dealing with Differences he focuses on a series of 'hard cases'--conflicts that appeared to be insoluble yet which were resolved in the end. Forester ranges across the country--from Hawaii to Maryland to Washington State--and across issues--the environment, ethnic conflict, and HIV. Throughout, he focuses on how innovative mediators settled seemingly intractable disputes. Between pessimism masquerading as 'realism' and the unrealistic idealism that 'we can all get along,' Forester identifies the middle terrain where disputes do actually get resolved in ways that offer something for all sides. Dealing with Differences serves as an authoritative and fundamentally pragmatic pathway for anyone who has to engage in the highly contentious worlds of planning and policymaking.

Conflict and dispute pervade political and policy discussions. Moreover, unequal power relations tend to heighten levels of conflict. In this context of contention, figuring out ways to accommodate others and reach solutions that are agreeable to all is a perennial challenge for activists, politicians, planners, and policymakers. John Forester is one of America's eminent scholars of progressive planning and dispute resolution in the policy arena, and in Dealing with Differences he focuses on a series of 'hard cases'--conflicts that appeared to be insoluble yet which were resolved in the end. Forester ranges across the country--from Hawaii to Maryland to Washington State--and across issues--the environment, ethnic conflict, and HIV. Throughout, he focuses on how innovative mediators settled seemingly intractable disputes. Between pessimism masquerading as 'realism' and the unrealistic idealism that 'we can all get along,' Forester identifies the middle terrain where disputes do actually get resolved in ways that offer something for all sides. Dealing with Differences serves as an authoritative and fundamentally pragmatic pathway for anyone who has to engage in the highly contentious worlds of planning and policymaking.

Too often attacked as hopelessly abstract, contemporary critical social theory can help us to understand both public policy and its analysis. In this book, John Forester shows how policy analysis, planning, and public administration are thoroughly political communicative practices that subtly and selectively organize public attention. Drawing from Jürgen Habermas's critical communications theory of society, Forester shows how policy developments alter the social infrastructure of society. He provides a clear introduction to critical social theory at the same time that he clarifies the practical and political challenges facing public policy analysts, public managers, and planners working in many fields.

Why do our best-laid plans often over-reach and under-achieve? Why do our attempts to solve problems in some rational way often run afoul of politics and power? Why do we so often accomplish so little, even as we sense that so much more is possible? By looking closely at the work of city planners, Planning in the Face of Power addresses these questions and provides a new way of thinking about the practical and inevitably political work of improving our neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, and the public institutions that shape our lives. Power and inequality are realities that planners of all kinds must face in the practical world. In Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester argues that effective, public-serving planners can overcome the traditional--but paralyzing--dichotomies of being either professional or political, detached and distantly rational or engaged and change-oriented. Because inequalities of power directly structure planning practice, planners who are blind to relations of power will inevitably fail. Forester shows how, in the face of the conflict-ridden demands of practice, planners can think politically and rationally at the same time, avoid common sources of failure, and work to advance both a vision of the broader public good and the interests of the least powerful members of society. This book provides a systematic reformulation of the politics of professional practice in the arena of city planning, public policy making, and public administration and management. It has immediate implications for the study of administration and management and for students of administration and planning in schools of social work, education, and public health. While focusing concretely on problems of planning practice (e.g. planners' sources of influence, their difficulties of listening critically, their understandings of the politics of organizations), Planning in the Face of Power brings to bear a wide range of theoretical insights and so integrates social and political theory with the demands of actual practice. Accordingly, the book will be important to practitioners who seek to understand the pressures they face at work as well as social theorists who wish to integrate theory and practice more powerfully, but will also appeal to the general reader interested in gaining an understanding of the practice of planning in the face of the realities of social equality and power.