Planning and Forecasting Definitions

Planning Definition

• Planning involves thinking about the necessary activities to achieve a goal.
• Based on foresight, the capacity for mental time travel, forethought is considered a prime mover in human evolution.
• Planning is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior.
• It uses logic and imagination to visualize the desired result and the steps to get there.

Forecasting vs. Planning

• Forecasting aims to predict the future.
• Planning imagines what the future could be.

Planning Importance

• Planning is a core part of many professions, like management and business.
• Once a plan is developed, progress, efficiency, and effectiveness can be measured, but plans may need to be modified or abandoned as circumstances change.

Urban Population

• Urban population is one that resides in towns and cities.
• Definitions include:
  • Population size.
  • Population density.
  • Economic base.
  • Presence of a municipal body.
• There needs to be a minimum number of people concentrated in a particular area and engaged in economic activities other than primary ones (agriculture, animal rearing, etc.).
• There also must be a municipality or town committee to take care of services and planning.

Urban Planning

• Technical and political process focused on land use and the design of the built environment, including air, water, and infrastructure.
• The infrastructure includes transportation, communications, distribution networks, and their accessibility.
• Traditionally, it followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements.
• The primary concern was public welfare, like efficiency, sanitation, protection, environment, social, and economic activities.
• Over time, urban planning has focused on the social and environmental bottom lines to improve people’s health and sustainability.
• Sustainable development was added as a main goal in the late 20th century due to detrimental economic and environmental impacts.
• In the early 21st century, Jane Jacobs emphasized the interests of residents, businesses, and communities.
• This influenced urban planners to consider resident experiences and needs.
• Urban planning addresses how people will live, work, and play in urban, suburban, and rural areas.

Responsibilities

• Include planning efficient transportation, essential resources, inclusion/opportunity.
• Also economic growth, health improvement, conserving natural environments that reduce CO2 emissions,
• Plus protecting heritage structures.
• Urban planning is dynamic, reflecting changes in how people live, work, and play.
• Changes are reflected in methodologies, zonal codes, and policies.
• It is a technical, political, social, economical, and environmental field.

Urban Planning Details

• Urban planning is an interdisciplinary field blending civil engineering, architecture, human geography, politics, social science, and design sciences.
• Practitioners research, analyze, think strategically, design architecture, consult publicly, manage policies, and implement plans.
• It is closely related to urban design, where some planners design streets, parks, and buildings.
• Urban planners work with civil engineering, landscape architecture, architecture, and public administration to achieve goals.
• Early urban planners came from those fields - now it is a separate discipline.
• It is a broader category including areas such as land-use, zoning, economic development, environmental, and transportation planning.
• It requires an understanding of penal and zonal codes.

Early Planning Examples

• Evidence of urban planning and designed communities dating back to Mesopotamian, Indus Valley, Minoan, and Egyptian civilizations around the third millennium BCE.
• Archaeologists have found paved streets laid out at right angles, which was adopted by different civilizations.
• Greek city-states were centered on orthogonal (grid-like) plans by the 8th century BCE.
• Ancient Romans, inspired by Greeks, used orthogonal plans for military defense and public convenience.
• The Roman Empire’s spread disseminated ideas of urban planning but these diminished after its decline.
• Cities in Europe often grew organically from the 9th to 14th centuries but new cities experienced enlargement in the Renaissance.
• From the 15th century on, design treatises appeared.
• Questions around planning needs were addressed and designs of towns and cities were depicted.
• During the Enlightenment, European rulers aimed to redesign capitals.
• During the Second French Empire, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, directed by Napoleon III, modernized Paris with long, straight boulevards.

Good and Bad Cities

• Design professions, including architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and urban design, share intellectual roots, ideals, and practices.
• They aim to link the built environment with human flourishing, creating better cities.
• They encompass socially accepted ideas of living well, shaping environments for social well-being and new possibilities.
• The built environment is a function of time and place-specific social relations, including not only designers but landowners, investors, developers, builders, leaders, agencies, associations, and consumers.
• This is defined as “systems of building provision”.
• Cities are “giant machines for making money” that must be reinvested, fulfilling interrelated roles in capitalist economies.
• First role for cities is mobilizing labor, capital, and raw materials, where classic economic advantages of centrality and agglomeration are conducive to capitalist enterprise.
• Second they act as decision-making settings with concentrations of political and economic power.
• Third they act in a generative capacity by concentrating people leading to greater interaction/competition, becoming "creative fields".
• As all of these play out, capital can result in great buildings, townscapes, and communities but also sterile settings, unhealthy environments, and disenfranchisement.
• Society looks to design professions to maximize positive outcomes and minimize the negatives.

Framework Development

• Foundational ideas about the good city were systematically developed during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
• These were influenced by Greek and Roman precedents.
• Early thinking was framed exclusively around the concerns and aspirations of educated elites.
• Matters of taste became the primary theme.
• Celebrations and the appreciation of the beautiful was a prominent dimension.
• The overwhelming emphasis on embodied cultural capital later influenced the design professions.

Modernist Visions

• Modernists believed architecture and urban design should no longer be dominated by bourgeois values, historicism, privacy, and individualization.
• Rather, there should be a Neues Bauen, a new way of building, encompassing a mixture of social classes and encouraging the formation of communities on the green periphery of the city.