In this essay Christensen reviews her 50-year career as a planner, researcher, and teacher. A college summer internship in New York City exposed her to urban problems and initiatives, leading to her thesis and subsequent job at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she worked on interagency and intergovernmental projects. Later she studied at the University of California, Berkeley’s, Department of City and Regional Planning, where she became a member of the faculty. In her research and teaching she examined wicked planning problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973), uncertainty in planning, and organizational and intergovernmental decision making, as well as housing. To help students do better at doing good, she taught savvy through a course on planning institutions, and she continues to be engaged with planning theory.

The research addresses practitioners’ perspective on the theoretical debate over process versus outcome. Analysis of 119 structured interviews of exemplary planners on their roles, goals, constraints, and strategies finds support for both sides. Planners are process-oriented facilitators who use communication and networking strategies. Ninety-five percent are outcome oriented, either toward their own goals, such as equity, or their agencies’, such as affordable housing. They plan in institutionally constrained practice settings of unequal power. They tailor strategies to constraints of politics, bureaucracy, or limited resources. Thus, planners reconcile the debate, using processes to achieve valued outcomes.