ENVS10011 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Garden City Movement, Regional Planning, Ian Mcharg
17 May 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
WEEK 11: URBAN + REGIONAL PLANNING
Planning: determining a desired future outcome, then making it occur
• Making collective + individual decisions that heed present + future effects
• Challenges:
o Different stakeholders wanting different things
o Expectation of democracy
o Do not look beyond immediate interests, or consider future
o Once built, hard to change
• Legislation privileges human interest + growth and development
• Challenge of the ‘good plan’
o Determining an agreed beneficial future, then causing that to occur:
▪ Spatial
▪ Temporal
▪ Collective
• Regional planning: sub-field of urban planning, as it relates land use practices on a
broader scale
• Challenge: building at a good density on the urban fringe
Origin of Planning
• Traced back to research by Dr. Snow + colleges – Cholera outbreak in London –
spatial research 1854
o Understanding of why some areas received higher outbreaks
• Villages + towns grew quickly in England due to Industrial Revolution (1850’s) – very few
building or planning controls until 1880
o 30 years of unregulated growth
• Ebenezer Howard + Garden City movement, from 1890’s onwards
o Join benefits of town + country, and remove negative effects
Planning
• Traditions of planning (need all to plan, often emphasis put on one)
o Physical planning
o Economic/Social planning
o Policy Analysis, Administration + Government
• Spatial Planning: concerned with the locations, relations + meanings between entities
in space at various scales
• Temporal Planning: concerned with change over time, + orientated to the future
• Collective Planning: concerned with individuals + groups, democracy
Regional Planning
• Regional planning combines analytical + graphic methods to project economic,
social and physical development in a given geographic area, for a given period of
time, and for the benefit of the region’s population in addition to + beyond the
national benefit which all regions contribute
• Regional planning deals with the efficient placement of land-use activities,
infrastructure + settlement growth across a larger area of land than an individual city
or town
• Allows us to view bigger issues with a wider perspective
• Motivations: ecology, transport, growth, population, recreation, infrastructure
• Patrick Geddes: introduced concept of region, connected growth + change with
urban form + social processes (in context of industrial revolution)
o Survey – analysis – plan (planning as a process)
