Views Of Planners Research Articles

Strategists Confront Planning Challenges

The strategic planning function has had its ups and downs over the past twenty years. How will planners fare in the 1990s? To ensure success for their organizations, here is one planner's view of the obstacles that must be met and overcome.

Assessment of Energy System Planning

This paper proposes an inverse optimization approach for assessing plans for a national energy system. Present energy system plans are built with consideration of not only the system cost (facility and operation costs) but also various non-economic factors such as supply vulnerability, public acceptance of plant siting and environmental pollution. However these factors are usually only implicitly taken into account. In other words the plan is built on the principle of minimizing total system cost and is then subsequently modified by the planner's subjective view.The purpose of this paper is to examine the planner's view on these non-economic factors quantitatively and as a part of the criterion function of the system model. To this end the entire plan is assumed to be a consequence of optimizing the quadratic utility of the system which involves both average facility and fuel costs and their variances. The authors propose firstly to evaluate these variances from the existing plans in the form of the solutions to the so-called inverse optimization problem and then to modify the plans in the usual way for the planning of an energy system.The methodology thus developed is applied to the energy plan of Japan and the results are shown.

The People Who Get in the Way: Changing Values in Urban Waste Management

The need for better understanding of “sociocultural factors”--behaviours and attitudes--is recognized as important to advances in waste disposal and treatment for developing countries. This understanding must include the views of planners and administrators and not merely the recipients of basic services. This paper focuses on issues related to waste reuse in cities. It is argued that there must be more research on informal waste treatment and use as customary practices (e.g. in aquaculture and urban agriculture) may form the basis for integrating reuse into community disposal and treatment. This will require changes in the attitudes of officials who often disregard established practices. Adapting informal waste reuse to urban development will raise difficult policy issues that social and medical research may clarify but will not necessarily resolve. Examples are drawn from Calcutta and Lucknow.

The regional equalization of health care and education in Syria since the Ba'thi revolution.

Virtually all underdeveloped countries suffer acute and sometimes debilitating geographical inequalities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity. These spatial inequities exist at all levels: between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between center and periphery. Some regional planners view such imbalances as essentially transitory and argue that with increasing economic development, wealth and opportunity will eventually spill over from growth centers and trickle down through the urban hierarchy to backward, less-developed areas.

Putting Us To Work On Their Terms: Benefits From Anthropological Ways of Seeing

Anthropologists often correctly assert that traditional anthropological concepts and methods are applicable to modern urban settings and problems. Yet for the most part, good examples of such applications are lacking. This article summarizes two community/classroom educational experiments which illustrate the value of an anthropological orientation for education and social planning. It focuses in particular on participant observation and its usefulness from the points of view of planners and affected communities. It stresses the value of planning with people rather than for people.

Wind — A planner's view

Wind — A planner's view

Applications of Landscape Evaluation: A Planner's View

Techniques of landscape evaluation have evolved in three broad categories: measurement techniques, preference techniques and consensus approaches, and consist in varying degrees of a mixture of classificatory description, usually fairly objective, and evaluative analysis, inevitably subjective. A major difficulty has been to develop techniques which can be easily replicated when used for the same purposes in different topographical circumstances. A further problem is that the skills required to adopt highly sophisticated techniques may not exist within the organizations of all but the best equipped planning agencies. It is therefore important to develop methods which can be readily understood and easily and widely applied. Are the objectives which have been cited for landscape evaluation realistic ? If one looks at current planning legislation and practice, the prospects are not good, either for existing designations or for the potential of new approaches in the planning systems now being introduced. ONE of the more remarkable features of the aftermath of the 'Countryside in I970' conferences and the vastly increased interest in our surroundings, which they and European Conservation Year stimulated, has been a plethora of new techniques for landscape evaluation. Perhaps this is not so apparent in America, where techniques have been developed and explored by social psychologists or behavioural scientists, but it is particularly evident in Britain where the development of these techniques has been linked with the preparation of development plans, a reflection perhaps of our relatively deep-rooted commitment to a more sophisticated land-use planning system.

A City Planner's View of Education In Environmental Geology

A City Planner's View of Education In Environmental Geology

A Planner's View of Agriculture's Future

A Planner's View of Agriculture's Future