Comprehensive Plans

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Throughout the western world once the need for urban planning was recognized albeit gradually there had been many stages of improvement in the way Planners approached urban problems. Various time periods saw evolution of different methodologies and strategies in the way planners plan. The paradigms shifted from focusing initially on large plans and city beautiful movements to more neighborhood based community improvement plans today. However, the most important change that had occurred over the period of time in planning thinking should be the way the focus had shifted from physical aspects of a city to community participation and intermittent process involved in making a plan. “Thus since the early 1960s, the plan has not occupied center stage” (Neuman 1998, 208). This Plans performed a secondary role, sometimes even as flexible documents to support the process. In the end the Planning documents saw more of the process in terms of bringing together various groups, citizen participation, identifying the issues, negotiating and mediating and forming the immediate strategies to tackle some of these issues. In the end the comprehensive plans and the strategic plans started dealing less with the physical aspects as the Plan implementation became more and more difficult and irrelevant to keep up pace with the fast change scenarios. So cities like Houston relied on no comprehensive plans but more on the large scale development projects, infrastructure led developments, and initiatives grown from the neighborhoods (Neuman 2003, 25). However it cannot be said there is a fixed way of planning as the process itself is constantly evolving and as more and more ways of theories surface, the debates of “content versus context, rational versus ...

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...as the strategic short initiatives. A comprehensive plan that ignores problems faced is always bound to face a lot of criticism whereas strategic plans that focus on immediate problems cannot take the place of comprehensive plans. There needs to be a balance in managing and incorporating comprehensive plans and strategic plans for immediate goals and future growth bringing in the diverse groups on the same platform especially when it comes to medium to larger cities where there are many pressing problems in wide variety of sectors.

Works Cited

Gomez, Maria V. "Reflective Images: The Case of Urban Regeneratiokn in Glasgow and Bilbao." Internationa Urban Research, 1998: 106-121.

Neuman, Michael. "Do plans and zoning matter?" Planning, 2003: 28-31.

Neuman, Michael. "Does Planning Need the Plan?" Planning, 1998: 208-220.

"Review Forum." AIP Journal, 1970: 47-60.

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