ABSTRACT
It has passed into the mythology of the field of rural sociology that when asked to define rural sociology, a wise wag responded, in some futility, that rural sociology is what rural sociologists do (Friedland 2002). Given that the practice of urban and regional planning is diverse and ever-changing it might be argued – with some degree of veracity – that if asked the same question planners might very well respond in much of the same manner: planning is what planners do. Yet there has always been a core to planning and this has been its overriding concern for land, how it is used, by whom, and to what ends. Land, in nearly all of its manifestations, remains the essence of planning; this has not changed over the centuries nor does it appear to differ from one cultural milieu to another. By no means is this to suggest that all planners are land use planners in the contemporary sense of the term. That is not the case. However, the larger point is that planners tend to think about and work with the problems of space as a central organizing principle.
