The Savvy Planner

By Elaine Van S Carmichael and Mary Means

An engaging and empowering handbook, The Savvy Planner is an essential reference for professional and lay planners that work for community change. Planners will reach for The Savvy Planner whenever questions about process, partnerships and securing commitments--the people side of planning--arise.

Why do plans succeed or fail? Too often plans bog down in a quicksand of endless process, political infighting and technical detail that alienate the constituencies needed to get anything done. How communities engage in planning affects whether they achieve change, often more than do market and other external factors. The book addresses crucial topics such as:

how to gather key data and information,

how to build teams and manage change,

opposition amongst stakeholders,

and how to begin implementing a plan.

You too can learn to spot the factors and conditions that allow some places to overcome inertia and move ahead, while other communities fail to attain lift off.

The Savvy Planner shares new ways to approach planning and, along the way, to open minds to the promise planning offers our communities and our future. It is essential reading for community planners, activists, policy makers, development leaders and students preparing for these roles.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138940461
• ISBN13: 9781138940468
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Routledge