Guidelines for Preparing Urban Plans

Larz Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351177610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

While many authors have written about what urban plans should contain and how they should be used, this comprehensive book leads you step by step through the entire plan preparation process.

Citing examples from across the country, Larz Anderson shows how to prepare, review, adopt, and implement urban plans. He explains how to identify public needs and desires, analyze existing problems and opportunities, and augment long-range general plans with short-range district and function plans.

Anderson presents these guidelines as tasks. For each task, he explains the rationale behind it, recommends a procedure for completing it, and identifies the expected results. Throughout, Anderson encourages improvisation — he urges planners to adapt the guidelines to meet local needs. Excerpts from recently adopted general plans illustrate Anderson's points and provide examples of variations even within his recommendations.

A related glossary gives comprehensive definitions to words that, though not technical, have meanings specific to the urban plan.

CHAPTER
1

Introduction

The Goals of this Book are:

• To introduce and describe some evolving concepts for the preparation of urban plans.
• To provide professional planners with specific guidelines, procedures, and techniques for preparing urban plans.
• To serve as an instructional guide for students of urban planning.

The major concepts of this book:

• This book concentrates on planning practice. The author describes the procedures currently used for preparing urban plans, as well as some of the emerging techniques.
• This book is intended for use in planning cities and counties where urban growth is an important local issue. It does not aspire to solve the problems of communities where social or economic conditions are the clearly dominant issues.
• This book is intended for use in planning medium-sized cities and counties in the United States. The procedures described here are probably too involved and expensive for small jurisdictions, and may not be complete enough or technically advanced enough for large jurisdictions.
• This book accepts, as a starting point, the basic concepts of the urban plan as described by T. J. Kent, Jr., in his book The Urban General Plan. That is, urban plans should:
  • Be long-range
  • Be comprehensive
  • Be general
  • Focus on physical development
  • Be related to the social and economic forces that the plans propose to accommodate
  • Be officially adopted by the local legislative body

The Major Recommendations of this Book:

• The long-range general plan should consist of:
  • A core, which identifies trends, issues, general goals, basic design concepts, major policies, and major plan proposals.
  • An element for each major subject area in the plan. Land use and circulation elements, which must be prepared in conjunction with each other, are fundamental. Other elements, locally considered to be appropriate, should also be incorporated.
• Short-range “district plans” should be prepared for selected small areas, in addition to the jurisdiction-wide long-range general plan. These short-range plans should be consistent with the goals and policies of the long-range general plan, and should be adopted by the local legislative body. They should be used as the basis for selected plan-implementing measures, such as zoning ordinances and capital improvement programs.
• “Function plans” should be prepared for selected individual topics, such as mass transit, economic development, historic preservation, etc. These plans may be either long-or short-range. They may be jurisdiction-wide, or for sub-areas of a jurisdiction. A function plan may be adopted as an element of a long-range plan only if it is general in nature. If it is specific, it may be adopted as an element of a district plan, or it may remain as a standalone plan.
• Short-range district plans and function plans should identify and describe action programs that are appropriate to implement them.
• Long-range general plans should be general in character, and may be based on relatively generalized data. Short-range plans should be quite specific, and should be based on relatively specific data.
• As a general rule, land use plan diagrams for long-range general plans should not be “parcel-specific,” but those for short-range district plans, which may be used as the basis for many plan-implementing programs, usually should.
• Long-range plans, which have a time horizon in the range of 15 to 25 years, should be amended as needed to remain up-to-date and continue to reflect the policies of the local legislative body. This implies an annual review, which may result in amendment, and a comprehensive review every five to seven years.
• Short-range plans, which have a time horizon of five or six years, should be reviewed, and possibly amended, annually. The timing of this review should be integrated into the annual budget preparation cycle of the local jurisdiction.
• The planning process should be considered as a continuous cycle. Preparation of a plan is not an end point; implementing the plan, and monitoring the impacts of implementation programs, are essential parts of the cycle.
• Plans, when published, should be kept separate from the publication of background data, and separate from the specifics of implementation programs (such as zoning ordinances and capital improvement programs).

The book also contains:

• “How-to-do-it” guidelines for undertaking many of the Tasks that are included in the planning process. These are intended as suggested planning techniques, not as the only acceptable methods.
• A section describing 31 plan-implementing programs.
• A bibliography of “where-to-turn-first” references.
• Selections from recent city and county plans, chosen to provide examples of good contemporary planning practice.
• An appendix that is a catchall of notes on planning techniques, drawn from the author’s 24 years of planning practice, and 17 years of teaching planning.

What Kind of Urban Plans Are We Talking About?

The term “urban plan,” as used in this text, is:

A document (or series of documents), usually containing text, graphics, and statistics, which describes desired future conditions within the geographic area being considered.

• The urban plans described here are appropriate for use in small to medium-large cities and counties in the United States with populations from 5,000 to 500,000. The resourceful planner, however, should be able to simplify the planning process described here, so as to make it more affordable for small communities. Planners in large jurisdictions should be able to introduce more sophisticated procedures into the planning process than are included in this text.
• The plans described here are strongly oriented toward physical development, which must be appropriate to the local and social economic setting. There should be a linkage between physical planning, economic planning, and consideration of social factors.
• The planning process and procedures described in this book are not appropriate for regional planning or for state planning State and regional plans should not be “local plans writ large.”
• The urban plans described here are those that are generally prepared for and adopted by public jurisdictions, such as cities or counties. They are rarely prepared for private developers or for private non-profit agencies.

The Intended Audience

The intended audience for the book includes:

1. Beginning professional planners who have not yet had broad experience.
2. Specialist planners who wish to relate their area of specialization to a comprehensive plan.
3. Experienced professional generalist planners who haven’t prepared or updated a comprehensive plan recently.
4. Students of city and regional planning.

It is assumed that the reader of this book:

1. Is interested in learning about advanced professional practices used to prepare general plans for urban areas.
2. Is knowledgeable about urban planning goals and general planning techniques.
3. Is familiar with: T. J. Kent’s book: The Urban General Plan, and So and Getzel’s book: The Practice of Local Government Planning (Second edition).
4. Has ready access to Kaiser, Godschalk, and Chapin’s Urban Land Use Planning (Fourth edition).

The hypothetical reader of this book is the planning director of a public planning agency, who is responsible for updating an existing plan, or preparing a new one. It is assumed that planning consultants, who have somewhat different responsibilities, can adapt the text to meet their needs. It is expected that staff planners with lesser roles, and specialist planners, will appreciate reading about “the big picture” of the various plans prepared in the planning process.

This Text is Intended to Describe, Not Proselytize

While the author is a strong believer in the usefulness of urban general plans, this text is not intended to convert non-believers. It is meant for those who already know the values (and the limitations) of the planning process, and know that they need to prepare urban plans.

This is Not a Book on Planning Theory

The recommendations in this text come from the work of professional planners, and from various writings on the theory of planning. The text does not attempt to trace how planning theory has affected planning practice, however. For those who wish to examine the subject, the following texts should be reviewed:

• Etzioni, Amatai. “Mixed-scanning: A Third Approach to Decision Making.” Public Administration Review, December 1967. (This text is included in Faludi’s Reader noted below.)
• Faludi, Andreas. A Reader in Planning Theory. Oxford, E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Planning Process
• Chapter 3 Plans
• Chapter 4 Introduction to Task Descriptions
• Chapter 5 Phase I Identify the Client and Participants; Draft and Review the Planning Program
• Chapter 6 Phase II Identify Issues; Collect and Analyze Data
• Chapter 7 Phase III Prepare, Review, and Adopt the General Plan
• Chapter 8 Phase IV Implement the General Plan
• Chapter 9 Phase V Prepare, Review, and Adopt District Plans
• Chapter 10 Phase VI Implement District Plans
• Chapter 11 Methods Used in Implementing Plans
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index