ABSTRACT
City planning has benefited from rich experience in building cities, starting with Mesopotamia in 3000 BC. In contrast, metropolitan and regional planning dates just to the nineteenth century, and there are no treatises on how to lay out regions: “Regional planning has become a necessity in most countries. But nobody seems to know quite what it is, and no nation seems to know how to do it” (Ross and Cohen, quoted in Gore 1984: 236). In fact, nearly from the onset, there was significant disagreement about strategy. The “metropolitanists” focused on supporting central cities and their economic agglomerations with efficient infrastructure and development patterns, while the “regionalists” advocated for decentralization and the utopian garden city (Fishman 2000).
