Preparing for the urban future

Preparing for the urban future

 Introduction

Every person and every organization plans. But as in eating, dressing, and speaking, some people and some organizations do it better than others. Some do it better in some circumstances than in others. Planning in an urban or metropolitan context is most effective in the mid-range, that is, when tasks of unequivocal importance and necessity must be executed within a fixed period for a clear purpose, on an appropriate schedule, with the money in hand.

Our purpose is to look at the anticipation of the long-term future from the point of view of urban public authority, and how that longer-term future is successfully or less successfully integrated into planning. We take longer term to be 10 to 30 years. The basis for this is a study done in 1985 and commissioned by the Academy for State and Local Government, which is a study group supported by the organizations representing state and local government. We reviewed 30 year 2000 studies dealing with state or local government. In addition, we reviewed and analyzed 150 other papers, reports, and documents dealing with the future of state and local government from 1972 to 1984 I (Hitchcock et al., 1985). The material we examined shaped our organization of the contents and analysis. From the studies and reports, 17 topics more or less obviously fell out, ranging from energy and the environment, to the arts, to tax and finance. A point to note is that as the nation becomes more populous, integrated and homogeneous, the distinctions between city, suburbs, and countryside tend to blur, as do the questions of responsibility and jurisdiction between city, local, metropolitan, county, and state governments. Consequently, while we emphasize the factors influencing the future of the city, the reader should keep in mind that most of these same factors operate at the metropolitan, county, and state levels as well. Let us turn now to our principal findings and then, as a close to the paper, to conclusions about pursuing the systematic view of the future as a planning aid for cities looking to the third millennium.

"AUTHOR "Joseph F. Coates

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