ABSTRACT
What planning is, and what it might be about and how it should be done, have been questions that have been around almost as long, or perhaps longer, than planning itself as a set of legal and administrative procedures (for example see Howard’s discussion on garden cities – Howard 1902). Having been born into scholarship in the era of rational comprehensive versus disjointed incrementalism (Faludi 1973a and 1973b, Allmendinger 2002a, Lindblom 1959 and 1979), it is interesting to see how old ideas become recycled in the later world of the twenty-first century, whilst new thinking is constantly added. The biography of this chapter attempts to plot out this sequence by listing theory authors in date order, as well as giving the more conventional alphabetical bibliography. This introduction to the Taiwan story therefore seeks first to ask the very proper question ‘what is planning?’ before going on to place Taiwanese contemporary planning within its wider global context.
