Planning cities

Rapid urbanization over the past two decades has generated extensive needs for infrastructures, facilities and land to accommodate the expansion of economic activities, services and settlement areas. Several objectives must be met against a background of a strong pressure of demand and limited resources. For planning professionals and urban authorities the challenges are many: to improve the basic information needed for ordinary land management transactions; to overcome the problems posed by the coexistence of differing land regimes and legal systems; to respond to the development of the so-called "irregular" neighbourhoods; to set up a system of government guaranteeing participatory and transparent management of land planning operations; to promote forms of access to and procedures of urban management that reconcile the interests of various social groups.

Under the banners of "regional cooperation" and "re- gional development," local governments are banding together to "plan" the future of their metropolitan areas. Fragmen- tation and decentralization, regionalists argue, are compro- mising the ability of cities to compete successfully in an increasingly competitive global environment. Only by pull- ing together through cooperative arrangements and, in some cases, consolidating local governments can metropolitan areas solve pressing urban problems such as poverty, afford- able housing, education, and job creation.

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

1. Cities do not only mean high density, pollution, traffic jams, homelessness, street children: problems and despair. They also mean diversity, social cross-cutting, information, culture, health facilities: opportunities and hope. Good planning makes the difference.

1. Undertaking settlement design
2. Spatial planning
3. Improving

1. Using ecosystem approach for settlement planning
2. Town planning
3. Supporting intermediate city development
4. Relaxing parochial preoccupation with community problems
5. Reconstructing inner cities
6. Providing contemporary urban images
7. Planning urban villages
8. Planning suburban areas
9. Marking city borders
10. Managing urban growth
11. Implementing urban innovations
12. Creating sustainable cities
13. Creating imaginative city plan
14. Balancing urbanization and industrialization

1. Renewing urban environment
2. Recovering costs of urban infrastructure and services to high income areas
3. Managing urban environmental problems
4. Improving services infrastructure in poor urban areas
5. Improving human settlement management
6. Controlling urban development

1. Coordinating land development
2. Advancing urban development

1. Unrelated buildings in urban environments
2. Unfocused design of community space
3. Uncontrolled urban development
4. Stultifying homogeneity of modern cities
5. Single-use urban areas
6. Monolithic architecture of high-rise buildings
7. Insensitive urban renewal
8. Inadequate town planning
9. Environmental degradation of inner city areas
10. Avoidance of shaded open space in urban environments

1. MUNICIPA