ABSTRACT
Information systems and digital smart applications are used very widely in cities, either through the planning process or else in parallel to them. The trouble arises because, although people realize that planning has this more general meaning, they tend to remember the idea of the plan as a physical representation or design. In practice having objectives in planning can be an effective improvement. It means that the whole planning process is more clearly articulated, more logical and more explicit. The difficulty is that they do all sorts of different things, and so they mean different things by the word; planning seems to be all things to all people. The reason for employing an activity called planning is the fact of life everybody knows: that modern society is immeasurably more complex, technically and socially, than previous societies. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
