Regional Planning and Institutional Norms in the United States: Civic Society, Regional Planning, and City-Region Building in the Chicago Metropolitan Region

Willem Salet'sPublic Norms and Aspirationsposes the question of civic society's role in twenty-first-century projects of regional planning and city-region building. This paper examines a regional policy coordination and planning tradition where civic society has been instrumental in reproducing and expanding regional planning capacity: the Chicago metropolitan region. Using archival methods and semi-structured interviews with regional policy coordination veterans, the author charts the critical role that civic society played in supporting regional planning capacity, where brokerage between public norms and institutionalized planning practice was critical to the survival of the Chicagoland planning tradition.