Crafting sustainability: The planning legacy of Lewis Mumford and E. F. Schumacher

Lewis Mumford's ideas of the region and garden city and E. F. Schumacher's ideas of development and intermediate technology are today, in one form or another, appropriated in the search for sustainability.;The region, the garden city, development and intermediate technology have been sources of conflicting re-presentation in the past, particularly in the context of divides such as ideal-real, urban-rural, tradition-modernization, imposition-participation, respectively. This is however because these ideas are read as objects to plan rather than, as Mumford and Schumacher see them, plans in themselves. Further, Mumford and Schumacher see them as plans that balance divides rather than re-solve them.;Planning to Mumford and Schumacher is a craft. It 'distinguishes' to construct ways that balance divides. Mumford's region distinguishes eu-topia (good-place) and ou-topia (not-place) to balance ideal and real; his garden city distinguishes organism and machine to balance urban and rural. Schumacher's development distinguishes living tradition and traditionalism to balance tradition and modernization; his intermediate technology distinguishes self-reliance and self-sufficiency to balance imposition and participation. The act of distinguishing allows planners to exercise a judgment of proportion rather than choice or mediation.;The experience of ideas as plans (or what John Henry Newman called real ideas and Jacques Maritain called things) and the act of distinguishing (or what the scholastics called distinguishing-to-unite or analogy-of-being) that characterizes planning in the way of craft goes back a long way. So does their marginalization in planning practice. The terms of contemporary planning theory which encourages reflection on or in practice has no room for it. Crafting a way for real ideas and analogy-of-being in planning is the task of this dissertation. It does not just explore Mumford and Schumacher's plans as ways of craft; it goes further to do so in the way of craft. This intrinsic purpose to speculation wherein the speculator is called to be adequate to the subject--in this case Mumford and Schumacher's real ideas--offers planning theorists a way of speculating that is not merely about plans, but an activation of plans. Plans thus live and balance rather than transcend, bridge or reject the theory-practice divide.;Mumford and Schumacher are thus planners in their writing before they are writers about planning or objects of planning. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).