This book brings together a group of distinguished international authors to analyze and comment upon the various roles of evaluation and valued ideas, in planning and education of planners. Topics covered include the nature of aesthetic judgement and of practical judgement, the implications for planning of various theories of environmental ethics, and the significance of key concepts such as heritage, justice, professional ethics and the public interest in orienting planning practice. Contributors relate their ideas about planning to a wide range of philosophical and social theories and debates, including feminist writings, discussions of post modernism, critical theory and the work of Anglo-American analytical philosophers. These essays will prove stimulating not only to planning theorists and practitioners, but to anyone interested in the way evaluations and key concepts contained in them can and should influence public policy.

Contents: Introduction; Environmental ethics and the field of planning: alternative theories and middle-range principles; Aesthetics in planning; Values in the past: conserving heritage; Environmental issues and the public interest; Planning and justice; Values, subjectivity, sex; The moral mandate of the profession? of planning; Political judgement and learning about value in transportation planning: bridging Habermas and Aristotle; Values and planning education.