BROADWAY 360

Broadway 360



Broadway 360

Introduction

Think of the things one sees in a city or region that everyone wishes were otherwise. They might have been otherwise if there had been careful planning in the past. The periodic confrontations over the building of new shopping centers, high-rise apartments, airports, landfills, and highways; the demolition of historic buildings; or the failure to conserve open space are a measure of the regard with which planning is held. In these contentious situations, the subject under debate is not the need for planning but rather the need for better planning, not whether but how it should be done.

Planning is a systematic process of thought and action intended to contribute to effective decision making for the welfare and integrity of communities and the sustainability of the natural environment. It involves forethought and the judicious or systematic use of scarce resources to attain a desired goal. The primary objective of planning is to make an informed decision. This entry reviews the history of planning, its development in the areas of both urban and regional planning, and the characteristics of the planning process itself.

Urban Planning

Urban planning is also referred to as city, town, or community planning. In Britain, the term town planning has been used since the late 19th century. “Community planning” entered the Canadian lexicon not long after World War II, when the Community Planning Association of Canada was formed. In the United States, the comparable term is city planning, and it emerged shortly after 1900 (Phillips, 1993). However, in both Canada and the United States, “urban planning” has also become the accepted term since 1960. Urban planning is defined as a systematic process of identifying community goals and specific land use objectives, exploring and assessing the options available to the community, and choosing and implementing the best option. Its purposes are to fulfill the following:

Minimize or avoid an unsatisfactory state of affairs such as urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and environmental degradation

Protect the health, safety, and welfare of the urban society

Ensure efficient allocation of scarce public resources

Most of the urban planning activities involved reconciling private and public preferences to solve problems caused by growth and development. The planning profession has evolved over the past century.

Urban planning in the decades following World War II was concerned with how to accommodate vast population increases by providing housing, public utilities, parks, schools, and public transportation. Cities and towns in this era were often subject to epidemics of diseases and prone to extensive fire hazards. Their new populations needed adequate housing, water, and sewage systems. The 1960s began with major concerns over the physical deterioration in communities. Hence, urban renewal became the focus of planning efforts until the “bulldozer approach” used to achieve it was called into question by Jane Jacobs in her famous book The Death and Life of a Great American City. In the 1970s, urban planning concerns focused on the effects that large-scale projects such as airports, shopping centers, and apartment complexes might have on the existing community environments (Kelly, ...