An ethnography of the People's Planning Programme

• Main Author: Bill, Roger Dyke
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 1974
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/7729/; https://research.library.mun.ca/7729/1/Bill_Roger.pdf; https://research.library.mun.ca/7729/3/Bill_Roger.pdf

The People's Planning Programme (PPP), an advocacy planning organization, operated in St, John's, Newfoundland for a sixteen month period during 1972 and 1973. It was involved in community action, it experimented with urban planning techniques, it served as a major opposition to specific municipal development proposals, and it evolved as a distinctive form of citizen's organization. -- The purpose of this thesis is to describe, in the context of a reconstruction of the career of the PPP, its experiences in community action, its experiments in planning technique, and the evolution of its organization as a response to an idealized composite of town planning, town planners, and the public bureaucracy. -- The method of study was participant observation. The design of the study was ex post facto in that the PPP as an event had concluded before it was applied as data for the purposes of this thesis. -- The data gathered was interpreted and analyzed in the context of a model of public decision making where town planning, town planners, and the public bureaucracy function to limit public control and public scrutiny of that policy making. Control and scrutiny of public planning policy is limited to l) those who can perceive and manipulate their universe in a rational and systematic manner, 2) move through the professional culture of town planners, and 3) move through the public bureaucracy.