Melvin Webber

Berkeley urban planning theorist (1920 to 2006) who described cities as networks of linkages and, with Horst Rittel, defined wicked problems in public policy.

Melvin Webber was an American urban planning theorist, born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 6 May 1920 and died at his home in Berkeley on 25 November 2006.^1,2 He studied economics and sociology at the University of Texas, took a master's in city planning at Berkeley in 1952, and taught in Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning from 1956 until he retired in 1990.¹ He directed the Institute of Urban and Regional Development from 1970 and the University of California Transportation Center from 1988 to 1996.¹

He asked planners to look less at places and more at the physical and informational linkages that tie people together, which he called "nonplace realms", and he saw the city as a giant switchboard.¹ His paper "Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity" appeared in 1963.² These ideas shaped the design of Milton Keynes in England.^1,3 He worked on the metropolitan plan in the feasibility studies for BART, and later led the first large systematic study of its effects on travel and land use, which found ridership far short of expectations and land use impacts minimal.¹

With Horst Rittel he wrote "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" (Policy Sciences, 1973), which separates the tame problems science handles from the wicked problems of public policy, such as where to put a freeway or how to set a tax rate.^1,4 The paper is discussed in the article on Bogucki's critique of incrementalism.