Essential Methods for Planning Practitioners : Skills and Techniques for Data Analysis, Visualization, and Communication
Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Jochen Albrecht · CUNY Academic Works (City University of New York) · 2017
Just over one hundred years ago, the great American architect and city planner, Daniel Burnham, said: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized.Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die …" His phrase has been quoted and re-quoted many times throughout the last century but slowly and surely, the idea of big plans has fallen off our agenda.When you examine the kinds of plans that practitioners routinely work with now, you realize that they are much more modest than the grandiose master plans of the last century.There are many, many small plans compared to big ones.Many are individual projects that planners then have to be able to integrate into the wider scene, and they often consist of small-scale changes, sometimes leading to much bigger changes, that have to be anticipated by the planner.To an extent, this has always been the case, but as we have begun to realize the complexity of the planning task before us, we have begun to focus our attention on finer and finer details right down to the most basic elements in the community.This has re-orientated our field to the local, the small scale, and the individual.This is in my view entirely what the focus of planning should be about.We must work with the small scale, for that is where urban change has the most impact on peoples' lives and on their quality of life.Moreover, this is where we can engage best with those whose lives are most affected by the pressures for urban change, by the imposition of plans, and by the inevitable conflicts that occur over the use and allocation of scarce resources, particularly land.What Dr. Ramasubramanian and Dr. Albrecht do in this book is to pose questions as to how one might best use and apply the many tools and techniques available for planning preparation and community participation in the planning process that have been developed over the last fifty years.They articulate how we might best embed these in processes of community and citizen engagement that infuse the search for good plans with the most useful ways of researching and communicating these ideas to a wider constituency.This is not a book that is fashioned as a step-by-step account of how these techniques and tools are structured.It is not a technical book, nor is it a manual for enabling the reader to construct techniques from scratch.It is a book that takes the Foreword