Urban Planning and Human Geography

Abstract

This article explores the intertwined history of human geography and urban planning and considers contemporary challenges facing these disciplines. Modern urban planning emerged out of nineteenth-century attempts to reform and modify the industrial city. Human geography has frequently provided the intellectual foundations for the analysis of urban problems and questions throughout the history of urban planning. The two disciplines have never been completely conjoined yet have provided each other with immense theoretical and empirical insights. As urban planning has sought to shape the trajectory of urban development, human geography has recorded and reported these efforts while also charting the transformations of cities that planning seeks to harness and control. Many of the methods upon which urban planners use in analyzing and comprehending cities have been drawn from human geographers' attempts to conceptualize, differentiate, define, and interpret urban social, economic, and environmental change. In the contemporary world, the problems of cities and growing environmental and social imperatives mean that human geography will continue to exert a critical influence that informs and challenges the efforts of urban planning to manage and shape the future course of our increasingly urban world.