What is the role of ideology in planning the capitalist city?
             According to Levy (329), everyone has an idea of how the world works and why it works the way it does. Levy believes that when we respond to something, we do so based on our beliefs of how things work. Most people would agree that the decisions we make are a combination of all the experiences we have had up to that point. We cannot separate who we are, our beliefs, or our life experiences from the decisions we make, no matter how much we want to or how hard we try. We would all like to believe that the decisions we make are strictly objective, that they are based only on facts. In reality, if we were to look back, we would see that they are not.
             The 1960's in the United States was a time of social and political turmoil. The country was embroiled in an unpopular war, political assassinations seemed to be commonplace and American's young people were rebelling against the status quo. During this time, a different type of planning philosophy emerged. The focus was not on the plan per se, but on making sure, the needs to those typically left out of the process, the poor and minorities, were served. Paul Davidoff advocated this view of planning (Levy 338). Davidoff believed that the process of planning could not be "value free" and objective (Levy 338). This was a radical view at the time. Personal ethics became connected to, and intertwined with, the planning process itself. Planners began to question where their loyalties lay. Should your allegiance be with the group you chose to advocate for, or should it be with the group who hired you and paid your salary (Levy 339)? Planners who were more vocal with their intentions often found themselves pushed off to the side, to languish in planning Siberia. Others decided the best way to advocate for the cause was to become a "guerrilla in the bureaucracy" (Levy 339), to work within the system to af
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