Communicative Turbulence in Urban Dynamics— Media, Education, and Planning

Conflicting forces within society provide the framework of market and political decision. This article examines the three most pervasive mechanisms causing communicative turbulence and thus affecting decision. These three forces, media, education, and planning, are dealt with as separate entities in view of their related but somewhat disparate character. Taken together they do, however, hold out the greatest hope in meeting the critical problems of the day. And, taken separately, they can each create turbulence of such intensity as to threaten nearly all constructive efforts toward meeting the challenges of urban change and reformation. Today, the media are forsaking their objectivity and their public service responsibility for an interpretative role which deprives society of a sound information source. Television in its present aspects is an active deterrent to successful public education. Public education is foundering from a complex of confused programs and interpolations from the various special interest groups and the interpositioning of the courts between the citizens and their elected local school boards. Solutions suggested are both new and old. Higher education is suffering from the effects of the student population explosion, further complicated by special interest pressures and by unwise quasi-dictation from certain federal agencies. The planning process, as prerequisite to improved management in all areas of social activity, is beginning to show advances in effectiveness owing to accumulated experience, increased and assimilated data, and growing public acceptance, particularly in the field of urban planning.