This best seller for regional planners introduces the foundations and applications of their practice in the United States. It offers guidance and inspiration to help professionals and students understand local issues in a regional and global context, define planning regions based on functional problems, and collaborate across regions as never before to advance sustainability and improve quality of life.
Planning Regional Futures is an intellectual call to engage planners to critically explore what planning is, and should be, in how cities and regions are planned. This is in a context where planning is seen to face powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually and practically – in ways arguably not seen before: planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but opened-up to a diverse group of actors; the link between the study of cities and regions, which traditionally had a disciplinary home in planning schools and the like, steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in interdisciplinary research institutes; the advent of real-time modelling posing fundamental challenges for the type of long-term perspective that planning has traditionally afforded; ‘regional planning’ and its mixed record of achievement; and, the link between ‘region’ and ‘planning’ becoming decoupled as alternative regional (and other spatial) approaches to planning have emerged. This book takes up the intellectual and practical challenge of planning regional futures, moving beyond the narrow confines of existing debate and providing a forum for debating what planning is, and should be, for in how we plan cities and regions. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Regional Studies.
This is the fourth edition of the classic text for students of urban and regional planning. It gives a historical overview of the developments and changes in the theory and practice of planning, throughout the entiretwentieth century. This extensively revised edition follows the successful format of previous editions. Specific reference is made to the most important British developments in recent times, including the devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the establishment of the Mayor of London and the dominant urban sustainability paradigm. Planning in Western Europe, since 1945, now incorporates new material on EU-wide issues as well as updated country specific sections. Planning in the United States since 1945, now discusses the continuing trends of urban dispersal and social polarisation, as well as initiatives in land use planning and transportation policies. The book looks at the nature of the planning process at the end of the twentieth century and looks forward to the twenty-first century.
""Describes the emerging use of collaborative scenario planning practices in urban and regional planning, and includes case studies, an overview of digital tools, and a project evaluation framework. Concludes with a discussion of how scenarios can be used to address urban inequalities. Intended for a broad audience"--Provided by the publisher"--
Regional Planning provides a comprehensive introduction to the concepts and theory of regional planning in the UK. Drawing on examples from throughout the UK, it provides students and practitioners with a descriptive and analytical foundation for understanding this rapidly changing area of planning. The book includes four main sections covering: the context and history of regional planning theoretical approaches evolving practice future prospects. New questions and methods of theorizing are explored and new connections made with contemporary debates in geography, political science and planning theory. The elements of critical analysis allow both practitioners and more advanced students to reflect upon their activities in a contemporary context. Regional Planning is the essential, up-to-date text for students interested in all aspects of this increasingly influential subject.
Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China provides an overview of the changes in China’s planning system, policy, and practices using concrete examples and informative details in language that is accessible enough for the undergraduate but thoroughly grounded in a wealth of research and academic experience to support academics. It is the first accessible text on changing urban and regional planning in China under the process of transition from a centrally planned socialist economy to an emerging market in the world. Fulong Wu, a leading authority on Chinese cities and urban and regional planning, sets up the historical framework of planning in China including its foundation based on the proactive approach to economic growth, the new forms of planning, such as the ‘strategic spatial plan’ and ‘urban cluster plans’, that have emerged and stimulated rapid urban expansion and transformed compact Chinese cities into dispersed metropolises. And goes on to explain the new planning practices that began to pay attention to eco-cities, new towns and new development areas. Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China demonstrates that planning is not necessarily an ‘enemy of growth’ and plays an important role in Chinese urbanization and economic growth. On the other hand, it also shows planning’s limitations in achieving a more sustainable and just urban future.
This book examines state and regional planning in four parts. First, it looks at the planning process and how it has been established at each level. Next, it describes the main analytical techniques used in state and regional planning. Then, it describes comprehensive policy plans. Finally, it explores the content of major types of state and regional plans for specific government sectors
Widely accepted principles and assumptions of American planning theory come under heavy fire in this refreshing and provocative book. The author's main contention is that, contrary to current supposition, development planning is, in practice, a highly political activity. Professor Rondinelli maintains that it is because the dynamics of the policy-making process are not properly understood that current planning prescriptions are inadequate when they are applied within organizationally complex urban regions. To illustrate his argument, he offers a case history of federally aided redevelopment programs for an urban region in northeastern Pennsylvania that experienced three decades of economic decline. He further believes that existing programs of planning education do not provide the skills, knowledge, and experience necessary for effective management of urban change. Curricula must be reoriented, he says, if planners are to have an impact on future urban and regional development. Finally, he sets forth positive alternatives to current planning processes, stressing the need for planning theory and practice that recognize and cope with the characteristics of the complex policy-making system.
Regional economic development has attracted the interest of economists, geographers, planners and regional scientists for a long time. And, of course, it is a field that has developed a large practitioner cohort in government and business agencies from the national down to the state and local levels. In planning for cities and regions, both large and small, economic development issues now tend to be integrated into strategic planning processes. For at least the last 50 years, scholars from various disciplines have theorised about the nature of regional economic development, developing a range of models seeking to explain the process of regional economic development, and why it is that regions vary so much in their economic structure and performance and how these aspects of a region can change dramatically over time. Regional scientists in particular have developed a comprehensive tool-kit of methodologies to measure and monitor regional economic characteristics such as industry sectors, employment, income, value of production, investment, and the like, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, and focusing on both static and dynamic analysis. The 'father of regional science', Walter lsard, was the first to put together a comprehensive volume on techniques of regional analysis (Isard 1960), and since then a huge literature has emerged, including the many titles in the series published by Springer in which this book is published.
