ABSTRACT
To many Europeans, even well-informed ones, planning in the United States is a
contradiction in terms. The country is seen as a land where rampant individualism
provides the only guide to economic development or physical use of land. Planning,
either in the sense of positive programmes for the regeneration of depressed regions,
or in the sense of control over land use in the interest of the community, is thought to
be virtually non-existent. Thus the United States is seen as a land where the phenomenally
rapid settlement process has been accompanied by unprecedented destruction of
irreplaceable natural resources; where extreme affluence marches hand in hand with
large-scale pockets of poverty, often close by; where urban areas sprawl unregulated
into fine open country, leaving a trail of ugliness and economic inefficiency. Fiercely
critical as it may be, this is the stereotype which many European professional planners,
and many intelligent European citizens, hold.
