I am getting you the biggest special issue of JAPA on planning ethics ever. The BEST special Issue. It’s HUGE. You’re gonna love it.

I have the best special issues. The best. Really. We are also bigly ethical. (No, the me part of we is not, but my other writers probably are.)

I have been out of commission blogging for a bit because every spare minute was spent trying to get these papers lined up and put to press.

Ok, sometimes your mentors say things like “Do you really want to take on that project because it is way more work than it seems like” and you (if you are me) bull-headedly go forward, and then, too late, you figure out, again, that mentors tell you things because they are trying to warn you away from trouble, not because they have nothing to do and want to mess with you.

So that’s all by way of saying that THIS WAS WAY MORE WORK THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE HOLY CRAP.

Nonetheless, I think we wound up with some very useful papers. We have:

  • a paper from Bonnie Johnson, Mary Kay Peck, and Stephen Preston on the differing ethos between city management and urban planning;

  • a paper from Carolyn Loh and Arroyo on the special ethical considerations of planners in private practice;
  • a paper from Mickey Lauria and Mellone Long that is an update and extension of a practitioner survey first conducted by Kauffman and Howe in 1979 (I love both these papers, and I super-love updates to date papers;
  • a paper from me and Nader Asfalan on why AICIP needs an open data ethic; and
  • a planning note from Orly Linovsky on the ethics of pro bono work and urban design and planning.