ancient cities

well as (or even rather than) the creative skills of
planning and policy making. The old idea of the
town planner as someone who literally plans
towns by making urban master plans had thus
given way to a view of the urban planner as someone
who possesses the skills to manage and facilitate
the process of arriving at agreements and
decisions to bring about urban change and development
in ways that are simultaneously publicly
desirable and privately feasible to those possessing
the power to undertake urban development. In the
language of one of the dominant planning theories
of the past 25 years, urban planning had come to
be seen increasingly as a form of “communicative
action.”
Urban Planning: A Complex Practice
This review of changing conceptions of urban
planning over the past 50 years has shown that
urban planning is a complex and multifaceted
activity comprising, as it does, an attempt to
understand and manage the complex and everchanging
world of cities in ways that gain the
approval of both elected politicians (and through
them, the public) and those who hold the power to
build and thereby effect urban change and development.
Some 50 years ago, to say of someone
that he or she was an urban planner (or more usually,
then, a “town” or “city” planner) suggested a
person who literally planned cities or, at least,
large areas within cities, and did so by creating
master plans for their future development. Now,
although master planning and urban design have
again found their place within urban planning in
areas where new urban development is taking
place, the overall activity of urban planning is such
that few urban planners literally plan cities themselves.
Rather, as this review has made clear, urban
planners seek, at best, to manage the development
of cities in ways that balance competing (and often
conflicting) demands and interests. Additionally,
urban planners are nowadays increasingly responding
to a further pressing concern, namely, to ensure
that cities develop in ways that will not, in the long
term, irrevocably harm the earth’s natural ecology
on which humanity depends for its continued
survival.
Nigel Taylor
Urban Policy
907
See also Sustainable Development; Urban Design; Urban
Theory
Further Readings
Fainstein, Susan S. and Scott Campbell, eds. 2003.
Readings in Planning Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Fainstein, Susan S. and Lisa J. Servon, eds. 2005. Gender
and Planning: A Reader. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Hall, Peter. 2002. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual
History of Urban Planning and Design in the
Twentieth Century. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
———. 2007. Urban and Regional Planning. 4th ed.
London: Taylor & Francis.
Levy, John M. 2008. Contemporary Urban Planning. 8th
ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Pressman, Jeffrey L. and Aaron Wildavsky. 1973.
Implementation. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Saunders, William S., ed. 2006. Urban Planning Today:
A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Nigel. 1998. Urban Planning Theory since 1945.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ur b a n po l i c y
Urban policy is the cluster of initiatives that are
intended by public authorities (government, partnerships,
single-purpose agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, foundations, and others) to
have an impact on how people live in urban areas.
What counts as urban policy has varied over time,
the definition of urban areas has changed, and
what makes urban policy distinctive (i.e., separate
from architecture, urban planning, and housing
policy) has also been in flux. Urban policy has a
long history and has played a significant part both
in defining how urban areas and cities are viewed
by governments and in the remaking of social and
welfare policy over the past half-century.
Some commentators have been inclusive, suggesting
that every initiative that affects urban areas
should be understood as urban policy. This is helpful
in confirming that a range of policies may have
(sometimes unintended) consequences for urban