Charles Hoch: A pesky pragmatist

Abstract

The Department of Urban Planning and Policy (UPP) at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) organized a retirement farewell on 31 March 2017 celebrating the almost 37 years-long dedicated service of Professor Charlie Hoch to the planning field. More than 100 members of planning fraternity, program alumni, and university leadership attended the event featuring invited speakers and testimonials from Professor Hoch’s longtime colleagues: Bishwapriya Sanyal, John Forester, and Niraj Verma. Subsequently, Professor Sanyal suggested—and the editors of this journal readily agreed—that the contributors compose a colloquium, drawing from the presentations made at the retirement event, reflecting upon Hoch’s contribution to the pragmatist planning tradition and influence upon their own scholarly work that the journal’s readership should find useful. Charlie Hoch stumbled onto pragmatism as a student of John Friedmann at UCLA in the mid-1970s. Friedmann in his 1973 book Retracking America had critiqued the idea of using rational planning for societal guidance and, instead, offered a Mannheiminspired transactive social learning approach. But Charlie had serious doubts about societal planning and chose to focus on how and what kinds of learning might use planning to cope with complex social problems. Studying the emergence of professional city planning in the early 20th-century United States, he discovered the pragmatist ideas of John Dewey offering inspiration and justification for a variety of urban spatial plans seeking to improve schools, playgrounds, and public housing. This encounter inspired a lifelong scholarship exploring, elaborating, critiquing, and interpreting pragmatist conceptions of planning and what these mean for the practice of spatial planning. During the 1970s, planning theory had not become an identifiable and credible subject for scholarship and research in the United States. The practitioners and students of spatial planning cobbled together justifications for their work selecting ideas from social science and design disciplines. The rational model that proved so fruitful projecting and guiding the instrumental growth trajectories of individual households, firms, and governments during the postwar boom often proved inept and even perverse when used to plan public housing and urban renewal. Charlie along with John Forester, Patsy Healey, Judith Allen, Howell Baum, Linda Dalton, Judith Innes (de Neufville), James Throgmorton, Hilda Blanco, Stan Stein, Tom Harper, Niraj Verma, and others recognized this phenomenon and turned to the study of planning practice trying to understand how people and the institutions they create anticipate, prepare, and cope with future uncertainty, 881858 PLT0010.1177/1473095219881858Planning TheoryVidyarthi et al. research-article2019