The Image of the Institution

Problem, research strategy, and findings: How do we make coherent urban plans in an incoherent institutional setting? How are institutions born, how do they evolve? Can they be meaningfully reformed? Or are they destined to bloat and muddle through? Using in situ interviews, document analysis, and participant observation, I investigate the role of urban plans in institutional design to address sociologist Talcott Parson's call for a theory of the dynamics of institutional change. Planners used images that they invented to build new and better planning institutions. Politicians used city and metropolitan planning as a political strategy to build the institutions of metropolitan and regional governance. Plan images were tools that coordinated spatial planning and urban policy. The institutional structure of urban planning and its governance is rooted in images of urban form that extend back several generations. These empirical findings formed the basis for a cognitive, lifecycle theory of institutional change. The cognitive component of the theory adds content to institutional theory, which had been based on structure and agency. The lifecycle component spans the gaps among existing theories of institutional evolution—incremental structuration, radical revolt, and institutional design—while incorporating lifecycle end points of creation and demise. Takeaway for practice: The plan matters because the images of place that are contained in plans not only guide the planning process and the development of territory; they also shape the entire institution of governance in which planning is situated. The role of the planners—to create the image of place—points to an important leadership quality, and to a key role for planning: institutional design. Research support: The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, the Catalonian Studies Program and the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California Regents, and Texas A&M University.