December 4, 2006

Professor Emeritus Melvin M. Webber, 1921-2006

It is with great sadness that the College of Environmental Design announces the death of Melvin M. Webber, Professor Emeritus in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Webber was an innovative urban theorist, an authority on city planning and transportation policy, and a dedicated teacher, advisor, mentor and friend. He died at his home in Berkeley, California, on Saturday, November 25, 2006.

Intellectually, professionally, and as a shaper of the academy, Professor Webber was a giant. His intellectual contributions centered on two big ideas that transformed urban theory and planning. The first—which is accepted wisdom today but was far ahead of its time forty years ago when proposed by Professor Webber—is that planners should focus less on the notion of physical “place” and more on the linkages and connections that bound together what he called “nonplace realms.”  His second contribution, developed in partnership with Horst Rittel, was to identify a new class of “wicked problems” in public policy, which by their very nature defied the possibility of solution by conventional rational approaches.

Professor Webber was also an extraordinary institution builder. From the first day of his 1956 appointment to the then-recently established Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP) at UC Berkeley, Professor Webber sought to infuse theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded research into the professional practice of city planning. This was his brief when in 1970 he became Director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD); and under Professor Webber’s leadership, IURD became one of the leading urban policy research organizations in the world. Beyond DCRP and IURD, Melvin Webber played an important part in the Berkeley campus, especially in the Academic Senate, for which he served on committees for many years. In 1990, he was awarded the Berkeley Citation for his outstanding service to the University.

Melvin Webber’s influence on scholarship and the planning profession also flowed through his role as editor and critic. In his tenure as editor of the field’s leading journal, then called the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, he elevated rigorous scholarship in conjunction with professional and policy relevance. He was a superlative editor—meticulous, demanding, and encouraging. Later in his career, concerned that planning and transportation policy research had become impenetrable to the average person, he founded and edited the journal Access, which sought to make complex analyses of policy issues comprehensible and engaging. He succeeded on both counts.

More than anything else, Professor Melvin Webber helped shape the minds of generations of urban planning and policy students. He was endlessly curious, and his desire to understand the real world as it was and as it could be—expressed with a twinkle in his eye as he asked a particularly compelling question—remains an inspiration to his students, colleagues, and friends around the globe. We miss him already.