Charles Hoch
Biographic Data
| ID | 349297 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Hoch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Hoch |
| SIGNATURE | HOCH C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2815-6969 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Inspirations in Planning: Edited by John Forester
Places need better planning not less
The authors writing in this special issue pierce the dark clouds of populist cynicism that fuel rightwing discontent. Do not retreat from the practice of hopeful professional analysis. Embrace and strengthen utopian plans. Include relevant details to attract and inspire popular interest and uptake. Show the inescapable impacts of climate change and the dramatic physical changes that need be done. Nurture a plurality of democratic planning experim…
Planning Imagination and the Future
Research evidence from cognitive science documents how everyday thought actively composes imaginary blends of possible actions. These include plans that inform intentions and infer meaning about causes, norms, and effects. Recognizing the pragmatic functional features of imagination can help scholars and professional planners better understand their own practice. I explore how this evidence supports the insights of scholars like Myers and Foreste…
How spaces become places: Place makers tell their stories , by John Forester
How spaces become places: Place makers tell their stories, by John Forester." Journal of Urban Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Knowing, acting, doing
Reconsidering Scale: Using Geographic Information Systems to Support Spatial Planning Conversations
How do planners compose plans that fit complex environmental systems? How do they align mismatched ecological and governance landscapes? We studied a small group of practitioners planning for groundwater sustainability to explore these questions. We recorded and transcribed their talk as they worked with geovisualization tools to diagnose and resolve future water shortages. Our findings showed how these planners crossed scales and levels as they …
Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements: The Rugged, Dialectical Path from Knowledge to Action
The Ebb and Flow of Planning Specializations
To understand the creation and propagation of knowledge in planning, this research provides the first look at planning specialization development. In assessing planning’s educational response to internal expertise, federal mandates, and historic precedents, we queried the seventy-six accredited planning schools on the evolution of concentrations and certificates offered from 1950 to the present day. We identify pedagogical trends by following the…
A Pragmatic Inquiry about Planning and Power
For several centuries, as John Friedmann (1987) recounts in chapter one of this volume, philosophers and social scientists have adapted the principles and methods of science to the analysis of human social activity and individual behavior in an effort to explain, predict, and thereby control the uncertainties of social life. While still a viable and robust enterprise in our own day, the presuppositions and claims of the social sciences about the …
Learning from groundwater: Pragmatic compromise planning common goods
Planners often struggle with the ethical ambiguity of compromise in the preparation of development plans. The plans they make face the resistance and criticism of powerful economic and political interests competing for status, resources, and authority. What help can planning scholarship offer to practitioners seeking reassurance and guidance for their efforts to make plans serving a public good? In this essay, we take a pragmatic approach that av…
Utopia, scenario and plan: A pragmatic integration
The concepts utopia, scenario, and plan offer important ways to envision the future of place. Utopia describes the perfect, complete place. Scenario compares good alternative stories. Plans offer useful provisional intentions. All three help us imagine how future consequences of select actions might influence current expectations and hopes. I argue that pragmatism can integrate all three along a continuum from holistic inclusive to selective incr…
Pragmatic rational planning: Comparing Shanghai and Chicago
Planners in Shanghai and Chicago inhabit contrasting institutional planning systems. Despite these differences, the professional planners exhibit a shared commitment to basic rational planning doctrine. But most importantly, they practice a kind of pragmatic planning that adapts the principles of sustainability and an inclusive public interest to everyday planning conduct. Professional planners share a kind of practical intelligence acquired thro…
Insurgencies: Essays in planning theory
The Ashgate research companion to planning theory: Conceptual challenges for spatial planning
Planning Craft: How Planners Compose Plans
Conceiving urban plan making as practical judgment shifts theoretical attention from questions of belief to questions of meaning. How do we make urban plans that combine intelligent coordination with savvy communication to anticipate and cope with urban complexity? Consider adopting a pragmatic approach that relies on coherence to inform the appraisal, comparison and selection that accompany practical judgment. Plans compose the meaning and conse…
Making Plans: Representation and Intention
Conceiving planning theory as a kind of practical reason shifts attention from making rational arguments justifying planning beliefs to the study of plan-making as a feature of practical reasoning. Adopting this viewpoint allows for the comparison of what rational planning theory keeps apart: theories about plan-making that focus on the representation of urban development (e.g. Lew Hopkins) and theories that study the intentional features of deli…
Pragmatic Communicative Action Theory
Communicative action (CA) theory need not displace the critical insights of social scientists, geographers, and other urban scholars about the processes of social, economic, and political change that shape urban settlements. CA analysts believe we settle differences in research findings and interpretations by studying the consequences these differences produce instead of claiming philosophical trump. In the first part of this article, I summarize…
Planning to Keep the Doors Open for Moral Communities
How do we plan for collective decision-making without sacrificing the benefits of democratic pluralism to planning demands for rational consensus or precision? Seymour Mandelbaum argues that we adopt and promote open moral communities. Using ideas of political theorist James Bohman, I review and critique Mandelbaum’s emphasis on critical irony and communitarian sensibility as these take for granted the important role planning plays helping us coo…
What Can Rorty Teach an Old Pragmatist Doing Public Administration or Planning
Hugh Miller’s argument that philosopher Richard Rorty offers a pragmatic upgrade for public administration does not work. However, the critics, in defending old pragmatism against new, miss some useful insights. Rorty basically helps us to grasp the hubris of claiming epistemic trump and to beware the quest for certainty in the service of the powerful. For instance, how would pragmatic ideas compare with more conventional theoretical expectations…
Evaluating Plans Pragmatically
In this article I take up the topic of plan evaluation. I compare two approaches. One approach uses Rational analysis, the other pragmatic reasoning. I argue that planners should place less emphasis on rational analysis and adopt a distinctly pragmatic approach when evaluating plans. Analysis may offer objectivity and precision, but it sacrifices context and continuity. A pragmatic outlook embraces context and seeks continuity among diverse viewp…
Sheltering the Homeless in the US: Social Improvement and the Continuum of Care
The homeless problem now enjoys a settled if marginal place in US domestic policy. Programmes to treat and remedy the homeless problem have also found acceptance integrated within a 'continuum of care'. Current ideas about the homeless problem and its solution emphasise social improvement for the poor - a solution that empirical research does not support. The overemphasis on versions of social dependence as the problem has encouraged the use of s…
"Commentary on "The Centrality of Normative Ethical Theory to Contemporary Planning Theory
The Paradox of Power in Planning Practice
Planners rely on the protocol of the professional planner to cope with the politics of planning. However, this protocol promises more than it delivers as a source of moral authority, and delivers more than it promises as a source of political power. The protocol simultaneously resolves and reproduces the liberal paradox between freedom and justice. Hence, the ambivalence planners frequently express about their encounters with power on the job may…
The Spatial Organization of the Urban Homeless: A Case Study of Chicago
The homeless emerged as a social problem in the 1980s because an increasing number of the destitute urban poor became visible. In earlier decades, the concentration and central location of the Skid Row hotels not only kept the very poor from public view, but fostered a variety of economic and social resources that enabled poor residents to obtain and protect a modest degree of autonomy. The destruction of Skid Row hotels to make way for new cente…
At Risk of Homelessness: The Roles of Income and Rent.Karin Ringheim
Doing Good and Being Right The Pragmatic Connection in Planning Theory
Mainstream American planning theorists have adopted a concept of planning that is amazingly similar to the concept of human action proposed by the philosopher John Dewey. Like Dewey, they have built a bridge to close the gap between being right and doing good, using a scaffolding that combines identification of problems, formulation of plans, and democratic participation. Unfortunately, these mainstream theorists overlook the limits of this pragm…
Pragmatic Communicative Action Theory
Communicative action (CA) theory need not displace the critical insights of social scientists, geographers, and other urban scholars about the processes of social, economic, and political change that shape urban settlements. CA analysts believe we settle differences in research findings and interpretations by studying the consequences these differences produce instead of claiming philosophical trump. In the first part of this article, I summarize…
The Spatial Organization of the Urban Homeless: A Case Study of Chicago
The homeless emerged as a social problem in the 1980s because an increasing number of the destitute urban poor became visible. In earlier decades, the concentration and central location of the Skid Row hotels not only kept the very poor from public view, but fostered a variety of economic and social resources that enabled poor residents to obtain and protect a modest degree of autonomy. The destruction of Skid Row hotels to make way for new cente…
The Ebb and Flow of Planning Specializations
To understand the creation and propagation of knowledge in planning, this research provides the first look at planning specialization development. In assessing planning’s educational response to internal expertise, federal mandates, and historic precedents, we queried the seventy-six accredited planning schools on the evolution of concentrations and certificates offered from 1950 to the present day. We identify pedagogical trends by following the…
Conflict at Large: A National Survey of Planners and Political Conflict
Results of a national survey reveal that planners respond to the risks of political conflict with either ambivalence or a willingness to engage in political organizing and negotiating. Among the planners who encountered politically threatening conflicts, most took efforts to prevent this sort of predicament, but their efforts usually failed. Organizing allies proved to be the only coping action that exhibited a direct statistical effect on confli…
Linking Informal and Formal Help: Conflict along the Continuum of Care
Increased attention has been given to the potential for linking formal and informal care as a means of stretching limited resources and as a way to improve the quality of care that people receive. This article examines the assumptions and previous research on which the argument for complementarity of formal and informal help is based. Recent research has shown that formal and informal help are essentially parallel. However, the difference between…
Evaluating Plans Pragmatically
In this article I take up the topic of plan evaluation. I compare two approaches. One approach uses Rational analysis, the other pragmatic reasoning. I argue that planners should place less emphasis on rational analysis and adopt a distinctly pragmatic approach when evaluating plans. Analysis may offer objectivity and precision, but it sacrifices context and continuity. A pragmatic outlook embraces context and seeks continuity among diverse viewp…
Pragmatism, Planning, and Power
Many contemporary planning theories share a pragmatic conception of action which does not adequately account for questions of power After a brief illustration of this limitation, the historical and structural criticisms of recent Marxist theories are analyzed It is argued that since both Mainstream and Marxist theories of planning both use the consequences of action as the ultimate test of theoretical validity, they tend to overemphasize their di…
Utopia, scenario and plan: A pragmatic integration
The concepts utopia, scenario, and plan offer important ways to envision the future of place. Utopia describes the perfect, complete place. Scenario compares good alternative stories. Plans offer useful provisional intentions. All three help us imagine how future consequences of select actions might influence current expectations and hopes. I argue that pragmatism can integrate all three along a continuum from holistic inclusive to selective incr…
The Paradox of Power in Planning Practice
Planners rely on the protocol of the professional planner to cope with the politics of planning. However, this protocol promises more than it delivers as a source of moral authority, and delivers more than it promises as a source of political power. The protocol simultaneously resolves and reproduces the liberal paradox between freedom and justice. Hence, the ambivalence planners frequently express about their encounters with power on the job may…
Sheltering the Homeless in the US: Social Improvement and the Continuum of Care
The homeless problem now enjoys a settled if marginal place in US domestic policy. Programmes to treat and remedy the homeless problem have also found acceptance integrated within a 'continuum of care'. Current ideas about the homeless problem and its solution emphasise social improvement for the poor - a solution that empirical research does not support. The overemphasis on versions of social dependence as the problem has encouraged the use of s…
Making Plans: Representation and Intention
Conceiving planning theory as a kind of practical reason shifts attention from making rational arguments justifying planning beliefs to the study of plan-making as a feature of practical reasoning. Adopting this viewpoint allows for the comparison of what rational planning theory keeps apart: theories about plan-making that focus on the representation of urban development (e.g. Lew Hopkins) and theories that study the intentional features of deli…
What Can Rorty Teach an Old Pragmatist Doing Public Administration or Planning
Hugh Miller’s argument that philosopher Richard Rorty offers a pragmatic upgrade for public administration does not work. However, the critics, in defending old pragmatism against new, miss some useful insights. Rorty basically helps us to grasp the hubris of claiming epistemic trump and to beware the quest for certainty in the service of the powerful. For instance, how would pragmatic ideas compare with more conventional theoretical expectations…
Planning Craft: How Planners Compose Plans
Conceiving urban plan making as practical judgment shifts theoretical attention from questions of belief to questions of meaning. How do we make urban plans that combine intelligent coordination with savvy communication to anticipate and cope with urban complexity? Consider adopting a pragmatic approach that relies on coherence to inform the appraisal, comparison and selection that accompany practical judgment. Plans compose the meaning and conse…
Homeless in the United States
The way public authorities presently define the homeless in the United States carries forward a complex historical legacy. The causal and moral assessments of the homeless, grounded in the work ethic of our capitalist society, have left behind four interpretations of the homeless as vagrant, deviant, sick or victim. Analysis of recent studies of the homeless, while uncovering the presence of all four definitions, found that most of the ‘new’ home…
Planning Imagination and the Future
Research evidence from cognitive science documents how everyday thought actively composes imaginary blends of possible actions. These include plans that inform intentions and infer meaning about causes, norms, and effects. Recognizing the pragmatic functional features of imagination can help scholars and professional planners better understand their own practice. I explore how this evidence supports the insights of scholars like Myers and Foreste…
Planning to Keep the Doors Open for Moral Communities
How do we plan for collective decision-making without sacrificing the benefits of democratic pluralism to planning demands for rational consensus or precision? Seymour Mandelbaum argues that we adopt and promote open moral communities. Using ideas of political theorist James Bohman, I review and critique Mandelbaum’s emphasis on critical irony and communitarian sensibility as these take for granted the important role planning plays helping us coo…
Planning Threatened: A Preliminary Report of Planners and Political Conflict
The prospect of political conflict frequently threatens planners. Interviews with a sample of 60 Chicago planners indicates the incidence of job threatening political conflicts may be as high as one in two. In contrast, one in three admitted purposefully avoiding the danger of political disputes altogether. In describing efforts to prevent or cope with political conflict, planners reveal ambivalence about the expectations of their professional ro…
Learning from groundwater: Pragmatic compromise planning common goods
Planners often struggle with the ethical ambiguity of compromise in the preparation of development plans. The plans they make face the resistance and criticism of powerful economic and political interests competing for status, resources, and authority. What help can planning scholarship offer to practitioners seeking reassurance and guidance for their efforts to make plans serving a public good? In this essay, we take a pragmatic approach that av…
Pragmatic rational planning: Comparing Shanghai and Chicago
Planners in Shanghai and Chicago inhabit contrasting institutional planning systems. Despite these differences, the professional planners exhibit a shared commitment to basic rational planning doctrine. But most importantly, they practice a kind of pragmatic planning that adapts the principles of sustainability and an inclusive public interest to everyday planning conduct. Professional planners share a kind of practical intelligence acquired thro…
"Commentary on "The Centrality of Normative Ethical Theory to Contemporary Planning Theory
Social Structure and Suburban Spatio‐political Conflicts in the United States
Social Structure and Suburban Spatio‐political Conflicts in the United States
City Limits: Municipal Boundary Formation and Class Segregation in Los Angeles Suburbs, 1940-1970
Pragmatism, Planning, and Power
Many contemporary planning theories share a pragmatic conception of action which does not adequately account for questions of power After a brief illustration of this limitation, the historical and structural criticisms of recent Marxist theories are analyzed It is argued that since both Mainstream and Marxist theories of planning both use the consequences of action as the ultimate test of theoretical validity, they tend to overemphasize their di…
Doing Good and Being Right The Pragmatic Connection in Planning Theory
Mainstream American planning theorists have adopted a concept of planning that is amazingly similar to the concept of human action proposed by the philosopher John Dewey. Like Dewey, they have built a bridge to close the gap between being right and doing good, using a scaffolding that combines identification of problems, formulation of plans, and democratic participation. Unfortunately, these mainstream theorists overlook the limits of this pragm…
Municipal Contracting in California: Privatizing with Class
Historical data are used to support the argument that the popularity of municipal contracting in Los Angeles County (the Lakewood Plan) resulted not from its adoption by local suburban residents seeking more efficient urban service provision, but rather from its use by members of local class organizations in order to create municipal boundaries that would surround and protect their territorial interests. The class position and objectives of polit…
Informal Helping Networks and Social Service Changes: A Community Perspective
Interviews with 112 household respondents and 58 social service agency directors in three ethnically and racially distinct Chicago neighborhoods provided a comprehensive assessment of -- household helping relationships in a community context. Reliance on informal helping greatly exceeded use of formal agencies at the household level. Households were twice as likely to give help as receive it in a complex variety of ways, while agencies struggled …
Homeless in the United States
The way public authorities presently define the homeless in the United States carries forward a complex historical legacy. The causal and moral assessments of the homeless, grounded in the work ethic of our capitalist society, have left behind four interpretations of the homeless as vagrant, deviant, sick or victim. Analysis of recent studies of the homeless, while uncovering the presence of all four definitions, found that most of the ‘new’ home…
Planning Threatened: A Preliminary Report of Planners and Political Conflict
The prospect of political conflict frequently threatens planners. Interviews with a sample of 60 Chicago planners indicates the incidence of job threatening political conflicts may be as high as one in two. In contrast, one in three admitted purposefully avoiding the danger of political disputes altogether. In describing efforts to prevent or cope with political conflict, planners reveal ambivalence about the expectations of their professional ro…
Linking Informal and Formal Help: Conflict along the Continuum of Care
Increased attention has been given to the potential for linking formal and informal care as a means of stretching limited resources and as a way to improve the quality of care that people receive. This article examines the assumptions and previous research on which the argument for complementarity of formal and informal help is based. Recent research has shown that formal and informal help are essentially parallel. However, the difference between…
Conflict at Large: A National Survey of Planners and Political Conflict
Results of a national survey reveal that planners respond to the risks of political conflict with either ambivalence or a willingness to engage in political organizing and negotiating. Among the planners who encountered politically threatening conflicts, most took efforts to prevent this sort of predicament, but their efforts usually failed. Organizing allies proved to be the only coping action that exhibited a direct statistical effect on confli…
Chicago: Race, Class and the Response to Urban Decline. Gregory D. Squires , Larry Bennett , Kathleen McCourt , Philip Nyden
A pragmatic inquiry
When scientists dissent
New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel (Conflicts in Urban and Regional Development)
The Spatial Organization of the Urban Homeless: A Case Study of Chicago
The homeless emerged as a social problem in the 1980s because an increasing number of the destitute urban poor became visible. In earlier decades, the concentration and central location of the Skid Row hotels not only kept the very poor from public view, but fostered a variety of economic and social resources that enabled poor residents to obtain and protect a modest degree of autonomy. The destruction of Skid Row hotels to make way for new cente…
At Risk of Homelessness: The Roles of Income and Rent.Karin Ringheim
The Paradox of Power in Planning Practice
Planners rely on the protocol of the professional planner to cope with the politics of planning. However, this protocol promises more than it delivers as a source of moral authority, and delivers more than it promises as a source of political power. The protocol simultaneously resolves and reproduces the liberal paradox between freedom and justice. Hence, the ambivalence planners frequently express about their encounters with power on the job may…
"Commentary on "The Centrality of Normative Ethical Theory to Contemporary Planning Theory
Sheltering the Homeless in the US: Social Improvement and the Continuum of Care
The homeless problem now enjoys a settled if marginal place in US domestic policy. Programmes to treat and remedy the homeless problem have also found acceptance integrated within a 'continuum of care'. Current ideas about the homeless problem and its solution emphasise social improvement for the poor - a solution that empirical research does not support. The overemphasis on versions of social dependence as the problem has encouraged the use of s…
Evaluating Plans Pragmatically
In this article I take up the topic of plan evaluation. I compare two approaches. One approach uses Rational analysis, the other pragmatic reasoning. I argue that planners should place less emphasis on rational analysis and adopt a distinctly pragmatic approach when evaluating plans. Analysis may offer objectivity and precision, but it sacrifices context and continuity. A pragmatic outlook embraces context and seeks continuity among diverse viewp…
Planning to Keep the Doors Open for Moral Communities
How do we plan for collective decision-making without sacrificing the benefits of democratic pluralism to planning demands for rational consensus or precision? Seymour Mandelbaum argues that we adopt and promote open moral communities. Using ideas of political theorist James Bohman, I review and critique Mandelbaum’s emphasis on critical irony and communitarian sensibility as these take for granted the important role planning plays helping us coo…
What Can Rorty Teach an Old Pragmatist Doing Public Administration or Planning
Hugh Miller’s argument that philosopher Richard Rorty offers a pragmatic upgrade for public administration does not work. However, the critics, in defending old pragmatism against new, miss some useful insights. Rorty basically helps us to grasp the hubris of claiming epistemic trump and to beware the quest for certainty in the service of the powerful. For instance, how would pragmatic ideas compare with more conventional theoretical expectations…
Making Plans: Representation and Intention
Conceiving planning theory as a kind of practical reason shifts attention from making rational arguments justifying planning beliefs to the study of plan-making as a feature of practical reasoning. Adopting this viewpoint allows for the comparison of what rational planning theory keeps apart: theories about plan-making that focus on the representation of urban development (e.g. Lew Hopkins) and theories that study the intentional features of deli…
Pragmatic Communicative Action Theory
Communicative action (CA) theory need not displace the critical insights of social scientists, geographers, and other urban scholars about the processes of social, economic, and political change that shape urban settlements. CA analysts believe we settle differences in research findings and interpretations by studying the consequences these differences produce instead of claiming philosophical trump. In the first part of this article, I summarize…
Planning Craft: How Planners Compose Plans
Conceiving urban plan making as practical judgment shifts theoretical attention from questions of belief to questions of meaning. How do we make urban plans that combine intelligent coordination with savvy communication to anticipate and cope with urban complexity? Consider adopting a pragmatic approach that relies on coherence to inform the appraisal, comparison and selection that accompany practical judgment. Plans compose the meaning and conse…
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (25 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Economics (14 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Politics (12 works)