ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the use and development of the planners' key tool, the comprehensive plan, illustrates how a planning historian can support knowledge creation and evaluation after planning work is done. The choice of the comprehensive plan as the unit of analysis finds reinforcement worldwide in the field's professional associations' accreditation criteria that state that plan-making is a basic professional skill and the foundation of the profession's expertise. It traces the development and application of the comprehensive plan in one place, Cincinnati, Ohio, examines its formulation and its some updates. The chapter considers content analysis to illustrate changes over time, explains along with changes in the city's socio-economic and physical conditions. It focuses on the differing emphases in actual page counts and assessments of the substance of key components, of relationships between planners and citizens, of interpretations of geographic boundaries, and of methods or technology.