  We revisit G. Elek's notion of amenable representation type, where algebras
are characterised by every indecomposable module being "almost" the direct sum
of modules of bounded dimension. We give a new proof of his result that string
algebras are amenable that relies on the planarity of the coefficient quivers
of indecomposable string and band modules. Using this connection to graph
theory, we then show that clannish algebras are also of amenable type.
