Interdisciplinary Planning: A Perspective for the Future

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In 1982, the Ph.D. program in Urban, Technological, and Environmental Planning (UTEP) at the University of Michigan was restructured. As the final chapter in this volume indicates, the program was organized around an interdisciplinary theme with faculty participation from nine different schools and colleges within the University—Architecture and Urban Planning, Busi-ness Administration, Education, Engineering, Medicine, Natural Resources, Public Health, Social Work, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which contains the traditional disciplines. The challenge within the UTEP program for the past three years has been to continue to question the intellectual rationale for this interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, while also moving ahead with a tentative structure which emphasizes academic rigor and a balanced educational experience. In 1984, Kan Chen, the current direc-tor of the program, and Milan Dluhy, a faculty associate in the program, decided to solicit working papers from faculty and former graduates of the program that illustrated the kinds of issues and concerns that were present within the field of interdisciplinary planning. On January 12, 1985 all the authors who contributed chapters now included in this volume, plus Profes-sors Allan Feldt, Ron Inglehart, Mitch Rycus, James Snyder, and Kate Warner, met for a daylong conference to discuss these emerging planning issues and concerns. This informal conference was taped and all the partici-pants were asked to respond to a set of questions generated at the conference within a week. The Introduction to this book includes some of these more formal responses. The goal of the conference was therefore to move beyond the working papers and identify key issues and concerns that cut across the various disciplines represented at the conference. All found the conference intellectually stimulating and urged that future events of this kind be held. This edited book tries to incorporate the thinking of various faculty and former graduates of the program about the planning enterprise. As the Intro-duction points out, there are “common threads” in planning regardless of backround and training. What emerges in this volume is an interdisciplinary perspective on planning for the future.