ABSTRACT
One of the paradoxes of planning is that many social and environmental problems are best approached at a regional scale, but this is usually the weakest level in terms of government institutions and public understanding. Issues such as air quality, water quality, transportation planning, suburban sprawl, and tax base inequities overlap municipal and county boundaries and virtually require a regional planning approach. In the postmodern landscape cities and suburbs have expanded so much that it makes sense to think in terms of “the regional city,” as Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton have argued in their book by the same name. 1 Los Angeles, for example, often seen as a prototypical late twentieth-century urban region, stretches for nearly 100 miles in several directions and includes hundreds of cities and parts of four counties. The City of Los Angeles itself has become a relatively small part of the urban region.
