Planning issues are often considered to be conflicts between the interests of different groups, such as neighborhood residents versus developers, or motorist versus transit users. But planning concerns the future, so it often consists of a conflict between the interests of our current and future selves.
Strategic Planning
Envision Utah
Extensive citizen involvement was essential in the development of this comprehensive statewide framework. The elements addressed include air quality, mobility, critical lands, water, housing, infrastructure, and community. The framework offers a menu of strategies to locally achieve state goals to achieve growth while maintaining quality of life.
The Eugene Bicycle and Pedestrian Strategic Plan
City planners, students, and community organizers partnered on the project, using input from 600 residents. The plan addresses infrastructure, safety, education, and funding, with implementation actions assigned to both the city and community groups. The plan is a guide for City staff, community members, and organizations to move the city towards a more walkable and bikeable vision.
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visionPDX: Portland's Community Visioning Project
visionPDX was the result, a city-supported, community-led initiative to create a vision for Portland's development for the next 20 years and beyond. The goal of Portland Future Focus (PFF) was to engage citizens in creating a vision of Portland in the year 2000. This vision, born from the values and expressed needs of Portlanders, would shape a strategic plan outlining clear and definable goals and strategies to guide Portland’s growth and to ensure that the city’s future was a self-determined one, rather than a mere adaptation of its circumstance and surroundings. Portland Future Focus was an ambitious initiative, and boasted broad-scale involvement for a city of its size.
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When Planning Matters
Wed, 03/12/2008 - 10:17
Why plan? That’s an important question for a planning skeptic like myself. I’m not at all convinced that conventional public urban planning has much value, despite (or because of?) spending eight years on a city planning commission. Yet, I don’t consider myself an “antiplanner”. I’m happy to leave that role to my friend and virtual colleague Randal O’Toole at the Cato Institute. (He even runs a blog called “The Antiplanner”.)
Urban planning has a role even though, IMO, on balance, its application has had a negative impact on communities and cities. Notably, even the free market (and Nobel Prize winning) economist F.A. Hayek recognized a role for planning in his classic book on political economy The Constitution of Liberty.
The question is: what is planning’s role and, perhaps more importantly, how has this role changed or shifted in modern times?
