16 Facts About Urban planning

Urban planning, known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks and their accessibility.

Traditionally, urban planning followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements.

Over time, urban planning has adopted a focus on the social and environmental bottom-lines that focus on planning as a tool to improve the health and well-being of people while maintaining sustainability standards.

Since most urban planning teams consist of highly educated individuals that work for city governments, recent debates focus on how to involve more community members in city planning processes.

Urban planning is an interdisciplinary field that includes civil engineering, architecture, human geography, politics, social science and design sciences.

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Practitioners of urban planning are concerned with research and analysis, strategic thinking, Engineering architecture, urban design, public consultation, policy recommendations, implementation and management.

Early urban planners were often members of these cognate fields though today, urban planning is a separate, independent professional discipline.

The discipline of urban planning is the broader category that includes different sub-fields such as land-use planning, zoning, economic development, environmental planning, and transportation planning.

The Town and Country Planning Association was founded in 1899 and the first academic course in Great Britain on urban planning was offered by the University of Liverpool in 1909.

Urban planning planners studying the effects of increasing congestion in urban areas began to address the externalities, the negative impacts caused by induced demand from larger highway systems in western countries such as in the United States.

New Urban planning theories have adopted non-traditional concepts such as Blue Zones and Innovation Districts to incorporate geographic areas within the city that allow for novel business development and the prioritization of infrastructure that would assist with improving the quality of life of citizens by extending their potential lifespan.

Some other conceptual Urban planning theories include Ebenezer Howard's The Three Magnets theory that he envisioned for the future of British settlement, his Garden Cities, the Concentric Model Zone called the Burgess Model by sociologist Ernest Burgess, the Radburn Superblock that encourages pedestrian movement, the Sector Model and the Multiple Nuclei Model among others.

Urban planning includes techniques such as: predicting population growth, zoning, geographic mapping and analysis, analyzing park space, surveying the water supply, identifying transportation patterns, recognizing food supply demands, allocating healthcare and social services, and analyzing the impact of land use.

School of neoclassical economics argues that Urban planning is unnecessary, or even harmful, because market efficiency allows for effective land use.

The traditional justification for urban planning has in response been that the planner does to the city what the engineer or architect does to the home, that is, make it more amenable to the needs and preferences of its inhabitants.

Widely adopted consensus-building model of Urban planning, which seeks to accommodate different preferences within the community has been criticized for being based upon, rather than challenging, the power structures of the community.