¹ See, e.g., Young, Robert C., ‘Goals and Goal-setting’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 32, no. 2, 1966, pp. 76–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dyckman, John W., ‘Societal Goals and Planned Societies’, in Taming Megalopolis, Eldredge, H. W. (ed.), New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967, vol. 1, pp. 248–67Google Scholar; Dyckman, John W., ‘Social Planning, Social Planners, and Planned Societies’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 1966, op. cit., pp. 66–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reiner, Thomas A., ‘The Planner as Value Technician: Two Classes of Utopian Constructs and Their Impact on Planning’, in Taming Megalopolis, op. cit. pp. 232–48Google Scholar; Nathaniel Lichfield, Lecture on ‘goal-setting’ at the Town and Country Planning Summer School 1968 in Manchester. For an early attempt to set the objectives of metropolitan arrangement see Lynch, Kevin, ‘The Pattern of the Metropolis’, in The Future Metropolis, Rodwin, Lloyd (ed.), London: Constable and Co., 1962.Google Scholar Important conceptual analysis is in Gans, Herbert J.' ‘Memorandum to Social Planning’ in his book, People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions, London: Basic Books, 1968.Google Scholar For the systems approach and goal-setting see chapter 6 in McLoughlin, J. Brian, Urban and Regional Planning: A Systems Approach, London: Faber and Faber, 1969 Google Scholar; cf. also chapter 5, ‘The Goals of Comprehensive Planning’, in Altshuler, Alan A., The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1965.Google Scholar Goal-setting is discussed in a sociological context by Pahl, Ray E. in Whose City?, London: Longman, 1969.Google Scholar

² For a criticism of normative models in planning see Kade, Gerhard, ‘Introduction: La théorie économique de la pollution et l'application de la méthode interdisciplinaire à l'aménagement de l'environment’, Revue internationale des sciences sociales, vol. 22, no. 4, 1970, pp. 613–25.Google Scholar

³ The concept of town planning as a social process is elaborated in Musil, Jiří, ‘Town Planning as a Social Process’, New Atlantis, vol. 2, no. 2, 1970 (Milan).Google Scholar

⁴ The research team studying Ostrava consisted of 26 research groups. The Research Institute for Building and Architecture, Department of Sociology, Prague, was responsible for the co-ordination of the project and the research groups. The project started in 1966 and ended in 1970.

⁵ The social feedback model was according to Walter Buckley put forward in the midforties. An example is Lewin, Kurt's article published in 1947, ‘Feedback Problems of Social Diagnosis and Action’, in ‘Frontiers in Group Dynamics’, Part ii, B, Human Relations, vol. 1, 1947, pp. 147–53.Google Scholar For a discussion of social feedback models see Buckley, Walter, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.Google Scholar

⁶ The concept of social diagnosis as used in our study was inspired by Walter Buckley's discussion on feedback control of social goal-seeking. For a similar approach conceiving the community as a client see also John W. Dyckman's notion, ‘diagnosis of the client’: ‘Client analysis has drawn upon, and has developed, substantial insights into the aspirations and motives of the target populations. Presumably, client analysis will also help uncover and recognize the interest of groups who are disenfranchised of power, and whose real aspirations would rarely be reflected in public programs.’ See his Societal Goals and Planned Societies, op. cit.

⁷ W. I. Thomas' term ‘definition of situation’ proves to be very helpful in this context. For a similar use of it in urban sociology see Bahrdt, Hans Paul, Humaner Städtebau, Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1968.Google Scholar

⁸ See Znaniecki, Florian, Miasto w świadomości jego obywateli (‘The City in the Consciousness of its Inhabitants’), Poznań, 1931.Google Scholar

⁹ For an interesting example of the differentiated perception of the spatial structure – the city core – of the same city by different social groups see the study of Klein, Hans-Joachim, ‘The Delimitation of the Town-Centre in the Image of its Citizens’, in Urban Core and Inner City; Proceedings of the International Study Week, Amsterdam, September 1966, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Cf. mainly the studies by Berndt, Heide, Das Gesellschaftsbild bei Stadtplanern, Stuttgart: Krämer, 1968 Google Scholar, and also her Architektur als Ideologie, Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1968.Google Scholar The ideological background of town planning is also explored by Choay, Françoise, L'urbantsme – utopies et réaltiés, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965.Google Scholar

¹¹ The description of decision-making processes concerned with town planning in Ostrava is in Vidláková, Olga Investigation of the Administration and Management of a Large Industrial City, Prague: R.I.B.A., 1969.Google Scholar

¹² The terms of ‘vertical and horizontal community sub-systems’ are used here in the same way as by Roland L. Warren in his book The Community in America. There he describes the vertical pattern of a community as the structural and functional relationships of community's sub-systems with social systems outside the community. The horizontal pattern are the relationships between social sub-systems within the community.

¹³ The term ‘quasi-system’ for the description of the city was used by Pawel Rybicki at an interdisciplinary conference on urban problems in Wisla (Poland) in November 1969.

¹⁴ …values are inescapable elements of any rational decision-making process' ( Davidoff, Paul and Reiner, Thomas, ‘A Choice Theory of Planning’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 28, no. 5, 1962, pp. 103–15).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The fact that the choice of topics for investigation in the social sciences is based on values (Wertbezogenheit) was stressed long ago by Max Weber. See chiefly his article ‘Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. 19, 1904.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Cf. Harris, Britton, ‘Plan or Projection’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 26, 11 1960, pp. 265–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘We have suggested that at least in part, the city planner is better advised to start from research into the functional aspects of cities than from his own estimation of the values which he is attempting to maximize.’

¹⁶ Dyckman, John, op. cit. p. 250.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In urban studies the term ‘equilibrium’ is not frequently used, but there are two interesting attempts to explore its possibilities. Pfeil, Elisabeth in her study, ‘Soziologische Erwartungen an die zukünftige Stadt’, in Die Stadt unserer Erwartungen, Köln, 1968 Google Scholar, has stressed that the city as a complex social system should be balanced and without one-sidedness and deformations. She pointed out five vital equilibria: (1) balance between public and private, (2) local-urban balance, (3) social balance, (4) demographic balance, (5) balance between the city and the countryside. Norbert Schmidt-Relenberg has focused his attention on the methodological problems of urban equilibria. See his book, Soziologie und Städtebau, Stuttgart, Bern: Krämer, 1968.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Homans, George C., Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 112–14.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The term ‘disproportion’ is borrowed from the theory of economic planning.

²⁰ The theoretical background of this conception of equilibrium is dealt with by Norberdt Schmidt-Relenberg, op. cit. pp. 113–19.

²¹ The problem of long time-lag between an impulse and a reaction in complex social systems is discussed in Buckley, Walter, op. cit. p. 175.Google Scholar

²² For a more detailed description of planning environment elements see Jiří Musil, ‘Town Planning as a Social Process’, op. cit. Compare also the different approach of Faludi, A., ‘The Planning Environment and the Meaning of “Planning”’, Regional Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1970, pp. 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ For a well-informed account of the sociological background of town planning in East European socialist countries see Szelényi's, Iván ‘Introduction’ to the Hungarian edition of The Reader on Urban Sociology in Eastern Europe, Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1971.Google Scholar C.f. also Hamilton, E. E. Ian, ‘Aspects of Spatial Behavior in Planned Economies’, The Regional Science Association Papers, vol. 25, 1970, pp. 83–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and references therein.

²⁴ A good example of such a prognosis is the economic prognosis for Prague, , Praha 1971–1985: Ekonomická prognóza, NV, Praha, 1970.Google Scholar

²⁵ The methodological core of the goal prognosis consists in the confrontation of the existing ‘normal’ trends of social and economic change with developmental goals which are based on accepted values.

²⁶ Cf. Buckley, Walter, op. cit. pp. 58–9.Google Scholar

²⁷ The same idea, fitting the nature of urban dynamics, is expressed by Oscar Lange in his term of ‘ergodic processes’. Lange defines ergodic processes as ‘…such developmental processes, the course of which becomes with time, independent of the initial state of the system’. See his book The Totality and Development in the Light of Cybernetics, Warsaw, 1962.Google Scholar

²⁸ Young, Robert C., op. cit. p. 77.Google Scholar.

²⁹ The problems of logic in goal-setting are discussed by Gutch, Richard, Journal of the Town Planning Institute, vol. 56, no. 11, pp. 389–91.Google Scholar

³⁰ A plea for making explicit the values on which the planning objectives are based can be compared with the efforts of those social scientists who strive for objectivity in social research by ‘Bringing the valuations out in the open’, as expressed by Gunnar Myrdal in his 1967 Lecture, Wimmer, Objectivity in Social Research, New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.Google Scholar

³¹ The recommendations for Ostrava were summed up in a volume of 200 pages edited by the Research Institute of Building and Architecture.