ABSTRACT
To many Europeans, even well-informed ones, planning in the United States is a contradiction in terms. The country is seen as a land where rampant individualism provides the only guide to economic development or physical use of land. Planning, either in the sense of positive programmes for the regeneration of depressed regions, or in the sense of control over land use in the interest of the community, is thought to be virtually nonexistent. Thus the United States is seen as a land where the phenomenally rapid settlement process has been accompanied by unprecedented destruction of irreplaceable natural resources; where extreme affluence marches hand in hand with large-scale pockets of poverty, often close by; where urban areas sprawl unregulated into fine open country, leaving a trail of ugliness and economic inefficiency. Fiercely critical as it may be, this is the stereotype which many European professional planners, and many intelligent European citizens, hold.
