ABSTRACT
Standing on its own, the term ‘planning’ often relates to land use planning but, of course, it can apply to many other areas of public or private activityeconomic development, health, housing, social security, defense, energy, and so on. This book focuses on land use, urban and environmental planning. However, as will be very apparent, problems have a habit of becoming ‘interconnected’: they refuse to be neatly parceled into separate areas which can be conveniently dealt with by individual government agencies, policies, programs or budgets. This poses difficulties for policymakers and implementors; indeed, it often seems that it is this interrelationship of problems which is the central problem of government. The issue is neatly highlighted in Donna Shalala’s lecture on urban policy:
Yet such measures are often not even recognized as constituting ‘urban policy’.
