His scholarship appeals moral philosophy, oral history and ethnographic social science, as well as planning and policy studies.
John F. Forester (1948) was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a BS in 1970 and an MS in 1971, both in Mechanical Engineering.
In 1990 he co-authored, with Norman Krumholz, "Making Equity Planning Work: Leadership in the Public Sector" (Temple University Press).
In 1998 Forester was appointed chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, a position he held until 2001.
He served for 20 years as a mediator for the Community Dispute Resolution Center of Tompkins County, has consulted for the Consensus Building Institute, and has lectured in Seattle, Chapel Hill, Sydney, Melbourne, Helsinki, Palermo, Johannesburg, Brisbane and Aix en Provence.