ABSTRACT
When people live in groups or even have any significant contacts with each other, it is clear that they have to do some planning—that is, they have to think about the implications of alternative rules and arrangements and choose among them. People may devise rules that permit considerable decentralization and individual choice, or they may have rules under which most issues are settled by authority or tradition, leaving less scope for individual choice. In any case, these rules constitute planning: they are not chosen at random but are the result of some sort of political process in which various persons did some thinking (and also a good deal of compromising). In an urban area, the existing complex of laws, ordinances, and institutions for governing constitute a kind of "urban plan"--usually a rather helter-skelter one but nonetheless the result of human planning as we know it.
