Planning the urban environment PAPER 5

Planning the urban environment

PLANNING the urban environment is a very comprehensive process, and infinitely varied; it involves technology, forecasting and imagination, and requires the application of many disciplines, sociological and technical.

Throughout history, individual towns have been planned for defence, major industries, educational purposes, as distribution centres for transport, for recreation and amenity, and for administration, but beyond the fulfilment of these limited objectives the towns have usually spread in unplanned confusion, resulting in the congestion and obsolescence which it is an aim of town planning to avoid.

In Great Britain, the modern conception of town planning had its origin some 60 years ago in the Town Planning Act of 1909, which enabled local authorities to control the development of their areas within very broad limits. Since then, a large number of statutes have defined the developing nature of the subject to its present state of comprehensive control. It is interesting that, during most of that time, the practice and progress of town planning has been in the hands of civil engineers in local authority employment, who developed the subject to the stage of an independent discipline as it is today.