Planning

While not all articles and books identified here are devoted entirely to planning, each offers ideas on how to approach the subject.

1.  Creative People Must Be Stopped by David A. Owens.   Published in 2012, this book provides the process one should use to dissect the environment into which an innovative idea is being introduced.  Owens lists six (6) factors, each of which must be confronted and addressed if the idea is to succeed.  These factors – Individual, Group, Organization, Market, Society and Technology – overlap each other in varying degrees depending on the circumstance.  The key is to ensure all are addressed and that all are satisfied to the greatest degree possible.  Owens explains how this can be done in the book, providing suggestions for diagnostic surveys examining each factor in so doing.

2.  Introduction to Planning History in the United States edited by Donald A. Krueckeberg.  Published in 1983 this book offers the reader a series of papers that chronicles the growth of planning as a discipline in the United States going all the way back to 1840.  It begins with a short essay by Donald Krueckeberg inducing the purpose, scope and organization of the book, quoting Horace Bushnell from 1864 saying,

“Considering the immense importance of a right location, and a right planning for cities, no step should ever be taken by the parties concerned, without employing some person who is qualified by a special culture, to assist and direct.  Our engineers are trained for a very different kind of service, and are partly disqualified for this by the habit of a study more strictly linear, more rigidly scientific, and less artistic.  The qualifications of surveyors are commonly more meager still….  Nothing is more to be regretted, in this view, than that the American nation, having a new world to make, and a clean map on which to place it, should be sacrificing their advantage so cheaply, in the extempore planning of towns and cities.”

From there, Krueckeberg explains how planning separated itself from other disciplines and how its culture is less structured than that of an engineer or surveyor, but just as important in the overall growth of communities.

3.   The Practice of State and Regional Planning edited by Frank S. So, Irving Hand and Bruce D. McDowell.   This work was published in 1986 through the combined efforts of the International City Management Association and the American Planning Association in that no such work had been previously made available to those engaged in producing plans for multi-jurisdictional landscapes.   It begins by walking the reader through a bit of planning history before turning to the structure of state and regional plans.  Most of the volume, however, suggests ways to go about addressing common issues such as urban development, rural development, economic development, housing planning, transportation planning, energy planning, environmental protection, solid waste management, health planning, social services and education, criminal justice planning, and comprehensive emergency planning and management.