1357-5317 1998 E & FN Spon Creating public value in planning and urban design: the three abiding problems of negotiation, participation and deliberation John Forester Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA Urban designers and planners face three abiding challenges in their everyday work: (1) in a world of complex interdependence, they must learn to negotiate effectively; (2) in a world in which central planning is suspect and the authority of planners contested, they must often learn to facilitate public participation, if not more ambitious consensus-building; and (3) in a world of limited knowledge, extensive uncertainty and ample ambiguity, they must learn to make practically-pitched, well-informed public deliberations work effectively. These problems and strategies of solution are explored by considering closely the reflections of two prominent Israeli design professionals. Introduction This paper seeks to cormect the worlds of practice and the worlds of theory. Our basic problem, roughly, is this: How, in a world of politics and conflict, in a world of contested uncertainty and ambiguity, can planners and urban designers realistically act well? How, in Mark Moore's more economistic terms, can planners and urban de- signers 'create public value' (Moore, 1995)? To answer this question is not so simple, for planners and urban designers need always to try to bridge the worlds of the real and the possible, the worlds of 'is' and 'ought,' the worlds of inequality and suffering and that of job creation, of shoddy physical development and high quality design. Consider a premise: any decent account of planning and urban design must combine prag- matism and vision - a combination whose articulation we might call a 'critical pragmatism' (Forester, 1993). For those interested in modern social and political theory, in problems of inter- pretation and discourse, of ideology and power, such a 'critical pragmatism' bridges the theor- etical work of Habermas (1984) and Foucault (1980) with that of English language theorists like URBAN DESIGN International (1998) 3(1), 5-12 John Austin (1961) and American pragmatists like John Dewey (1927). To begin, listen first to the reflections of an Israeli city planning director, Baruch Yoscovitz of Tel Aviv, as he was summing up some of the lessons of his experience (interviewed in 1994). Yoscovitz tells us about trying to develop a style of planning that deals with the conflicts between planners, between city agencies, and between architects and engineers: [We have tried to develop al system of working together with other departments, of communicating with other departments, like the Transportation Department and others. This is something that we have to teach people to do: We want them not to make any decision which is not based upon the views of all the people involved in the decision-making. Don't make the decision yourself and just scatter your papers all over the place. Think ahead. Think before you do it. Co-ordinate your action with others, and so on. For instance, if you deal with an area where you have some city parks or small city lots which are green areas of the city, 5