ABSTRACT
Top-down planning represents a very strong tradition in city planning. It appears in any type of planning – strategic, comprehensive, district – when the city is designed centrally by an authority and constructed on the basis of this master plan. As part of this tradition, the city is conceived of as an integrated system which defines all lower-level plans or subsystems. Top-down planning does not leave much room for self-organisation and individual decisions by users or citizens to influence the plan. The city is not produced within a framework that guides individual decisions only, but through the detailed implementation of an initial idea. The whole process resembles the product development of a large and complex object, and product development stages and methodologies can be used. Top-down planning was exercised by various city planning movements, from City Beautiful to Le CorbusierÊs Radian City and Comprehensive Rational Planning, where most characteristics of urban space were defined centrally by technical and political elites. The top-down approach is commonplace in greenfield projects and new city-district design, where no pre-existing population and social groups are invited to influence the planning process, advocate, or bargain for their interests.
