Urban and Regional Planning

The History of Planning

The origins of city design and planning can be detected in many ancient societies and cultural traditions. In a more contemporary sense, the legal and jurisdictional evolution of urban and regional planning is highly variable—both between and within countries. Nevertheless, a collection of guiding principles and practices can be observed in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Planning, particularly at the municipal scale, appears to have evolved most significantly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The formalization and professionalization of planning, as one facet of societal response to the impacts of rapid industrialization and conflict over the external effects of incompatible land uses, can be easily traced. The instruments and practices of planning that emerge can be seen as one component of the evolving sociospatial dialectic at various spatial scales.

In its early forms, the legal environment of planning was strongly influenced by the common law of nuisance. At a societal level, this involved the notion that there were certain economic activities that were incompatible with housing and other urban land uses; some of these were considered dangerous or unhealthy, whereas others simply were undesirable. Ordinances and regulations on these bases typically prohibited the activities inside of city boundaries in a series of collective NIMBY (“not in my backyard”)-like actions.

As industrialization increased, broader concerns over health and safety were conjoined with efforts to respond to social, cultural, and economic conflict. In one dimension, planning became part of private responses to rapid social and economic change in the conceptualization and design of new suburban and exurban private developments and also in the utopian visions of thinkers such as Ebenezer Howard and his ideas of new garden cities. In a second public dimension, a concern for quality of life—whether conceived in idealistic utopian terms or in the practical designs for street patterns and transportation, water mains and sewers, public parks and open spaces, and the form and function of housing—brought architects, landscape architects, engineers, and an array of social and political reformers into the planning mix. In its physical manifestation, planning for infrastructure and public investment also had the potential for graft and corruption as it created positive and negative external effects. At the scale of cities, in their guise as agents of social and economic change, planners could be placed at the center of rapidly evolving capitalist social relations. The excesses of rapid economic growth and industrialization and the vicissitudes of capitalism in the urban context also drew the attention of national governments. Calls for regulation of laissez-faire economic practices included concerns over the central tenets of what evolved into urban and regional planning. It is important to note, however, that capitalists who might have opposed regulations and state oversight in general could support, and have continued to support, certain facets of planning that rendered investments in land and development more predictable and that might moderate the negative impacts of sudden land use changes.

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