URBAN PLANNING AT A GLANCE

Urban planning (urban, city, and town planning) is a technical and political process concerned with the control of the use of land and design of the urban environment, including transportation networks, to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities. It concerns itself with research and analysis, strategic thinking, architecture, urban design, public consultation, policy recommendations, implementation and management.[1]

A plan can take a variety of forms including strategic plans, comprehensive plans, neighborhood plans, regulatory and incentive strategies, or historic preservation plans. Planners are often also responsible for enforcing the chosen policies.

The modern origins of urban planning lie in the movement for urban reform that arose as a reaction against the disorder of the industrial city in the mid-19th century. Urban planning can include urban renewal, by adapting urban planning methods to existing cities suffering from decline. In the late-20th century, the term sustainable development has come to represent an ideal outcome in the sum of all planning goals

Modern planning
During the Second French Empire, Haussmann transformed the medieval city of Paris into a modern capital, with long, straight, wide boulevards. The planning was influenced by many factors, not the least of which was the city's history of street revolutions.

Modern urban planning dates from 1755 in Lisbon (Baixa de Lisboa) after the Great Lisbon Earthquake.

In 1852, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned to remodel the Medieval street plan of Paris by demolishing swathes of the old city and laying out wide boulevards, extending outwards beyond the old city limits. Haussmann's project encompassed all aspects of urban planning, both in the centre of Paris and in the surrounding districts, with regulations imposed on building facades, public parks, sewers and water works, city facilities, and public monuments. Beyond aesthetic and sanitary considerations, the wide thoroughfares facilitated troop movement and policing.[11]

The plan chosen to extend Barcelona was a rigorous project based on a scientific analysis of the city and its modern requirements. It was drawn up by the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà to fill the space beyond the city walls after they were demolished from 1854. He is credited with inventing the term ‘urbanization’ and his approach was codified in his General Theory of Urbanization (1867). Cerdà's Eixample (Catalan for 'extension') consisted of 550 regular blocks with chamfered corners to facilitate the movement of trams, crossed by three wider avenues. His objectives were to improve the health of the inhabitants, towards which the blocks were built around central gardens and orientated NW-SE to maximize the sunlight they received, and assist social integration.[12]
Ebenezer Howard's influential 1902 diagram, illustrating urban growth through garden city "off-shoots"

In the developed countries of Western Europe, North America, Japan, and Australasia, planning and architecture can be said to have gone through various paradigms or stages of consensus in the last 200 years. Firstly, there was the industrialised city of the 19th century, where building was largely controlled by businesses and wealthy elites. Around 1900, a movement began for providing citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments.