Abstract
Planners are the police of contemporary urban America. They enforce the rules, they regulate the process, they stop the offenders. But their influence in effecting change is in recession. They no longer create the grand design. Whether by cause or effect, the purposefulness that attracted so many people to the planning profession in the 1950s and 1960s seems to be missing today. What happened to planning's missionary zeal? Has it disappeared because planners have less impact on city planning than developers?