Evolving Concepts of the Public Interest in Comprehensive Planning

The public interest is an important, yet contested, concept in the field of planning. On the one hand, it offers a normative criterion against which planning decisions can be evaluated and is traditionally viewed as the source from which planners derive their authority. However, the precise nature of the concept is fiercely debated by both planning practitioners and theorists, with some going so far as to denounce its existence. Today, the increasingly pluralist and complex nature of communities lead to questions over the concept’s relevance and applicability. In the second half of the twentieth century, planning theoreticians began assembling a body of literature surrounding this concept, mostly in the form of typologies of the definitions that have been ascribed to the public interest However, my review of the literature revealed that the study of the public interest as a normative criterion for planning has almost entirely taken place in the realm of planning theory. Therefore, I sought to add to the empirical scholarship concerning the public interest by analyzing it from two angles: first, I sought to understand how the public interest as a historical concept has changed and evolved alongside the field of planning throughout the twentieth century. Second, I chose the field of comprehensive planning as my analytical lens due to its longevity across the history of the planning profession and its close affiliation to the concept of the public interest. Specifically, I sought to analyze how the public interest is manifested in a series of comprehensive plan documents and thereby illustrate how the concept’s operationalization has evolved over the course of the past half century of planning. I began my analysis by drawing on over fifty years of scholarship to construct my own typology of the main definitions of the public interest. I then applied these definitions to four different models of comprehensive planning that were developed between 1962 and 2012. I also obtained a second perspective on the evolution of the concept of public interest by examining a series of comprehensive plans adopted by the City of Annapolis between 1964 and 2022. The two analyses revealed very different trajectories in the evolution of the public interest as an empirical concept. On the one hand, the four models demonstrate a fairly linear evolution in what is constituted to be the substance and process of constituting the public interest, which can be broadly classified as achieving social equity, the responsible stewardship of natural resources, and authentic citizen involvement. By contrast, the five Annapolis comprehensive plans did not neatly follow the same evolution. Instead, a recurring concern for many of the Annapolis plans is the conservation of the physical city through the control of the city’s growth, the careful maintenance of its economy, and the preservation of its urban fabric. However, the more recent plans demonstrate a stronger commitment to the social values and processes espoused by the four planning models, indicating that there is growing consensus in the field of planning today regarding an empirical understanding of the public interest.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Tagliani, Jessie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Glenn, Ezra

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162085

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/162085