Activities and Land Uses in Planning - Essay Example

INTRODUCTION For thousands of years Urban and Regional planning has been recognised as an inherently imaginative activity. When it is geared towards improvement of the quality of human living conditions it becomes an act of social idealism. As a Planner, in the anticipation for the future, one can pursue the highest goals and derive great benefits from criticism encountered in the course of the consultation stages of planning. The proposals contain ideas that depend on existing conditions as well as resources that can be predicted to be there in the future. One has to employ transformational and responsive planning and design that reflects the true nature of life as put forward by Michelet’s aphorism that nothing is created, nothing is destroyed but everything is transformed. A planner has to therefore know that it is ideas that give meaning to observations made rather than ideas emerging from mere statistical data collected from observations. A planner should be conscience of the fact that there is not one solution that fits all but each individual case has to suit the values and choices of the communities that are meant to benefit from them. Customised solution give communities a more fulfilling and rewarding life. In planning, consideration is to be given to available resources, opportunities and constraints. This is essential for planning in order to get the best plan that meets objectives and policies. Planning therefore is a process that has to be driven by values, shaped by information and expressed in specific proposals. Plans that are insensitive and preconceived without consultation are likely to be delayed or prevented by the public and if the plan is implemented the chances of failure are usually high. To the planner, public consultation produces valid and personally identified objectives which lend purpose and direction to the planning process. Objectives are the critical component in negotiations as they are common in all life situations. As a planner they are therefore a great tool to have to get fair and sustainable outcomes. Objectives are ranked according to the information collected and relative priority with which the community views them. Planning can only be a reflection of the knowledge of the past and present. These reflections are used to come up with policies that are based on their interpretations. This is possible by making use of the human capacity to make intelligent and educated guesses about future conditions. This is hence the basis of predictions which have come to be the infallible tool of problem solving in the modern day age of information. The analysis of resources based on prediction is important in promoting efficiency due to the world resources diminishing or are limited. Resource analysis is a continuous process that is linked to all planning stages. For planning to be effective, it has to be evaluated either continuously or at some stages towards the end. This is important to ensure that public and private interests have been served. Efficiency has to be continuously evaluated to make good use of all resources. CONCLUSION The complex relationship involving values, activities and land uses in planning have been discussed. Different values that are needs-based, consciousness-based and conditioned have been examined to determine the extent to which they should influence the direction of plans. In planning, the problems felt acutely by most people should be given more consideration over other problems. This principle should be followed even when professional belief is in conflict with what suits the majority. Values have been noted to clearly come from innate drives such as sustenance, nurture, procreation, rest and security. For developed values that come from years of evolution such as knowledge, order, diversity, choice, beauty, social justice and harmony are slow to change and therefore easier to plan for. These values form an important part of the genetic inheritance of each human being. They are identified as objectives and are the reason for different activities and land use. The rational and durable values are those that are shared between large groups of individuals. These can therefore be understand or brought in to plan by conducting individual and group consultation. Design of objectives should be avoided as people do not live to share in the designer’s own values and objectives. In planning one should take care not to take behaviour indicator with totality as frustration of people’s perceived needs rather than satisfaction of their objectives are expressed due to the existing constraining conditions. It is also worth noting that existing activities could be a reflection of power relations, inequalities and limitation of opportunities. In planning, these should be taken care of so that policies are made to take care of genuine public and individual preferences. The ideas of the populations to be served therefore cannot be ignored in planning nor new ideas be imposed on the population that is set to benefit from the policies being formulated. In planning, any activity that reflects identified objectives should be promoted. This will work towards suppressing those objectives that bring inequalities and limitations to opportunities. In planning, the futures are not only created but they are also prevented if they are likely to make it difficult to achieve certain desired objectives. The proposed outcomes should also be tested to see if they fulfil the objectives intended. The analysis of resources is crucial for efficiency purposes and cost management of the intended policy implementation. All stages are important when planning but some may need more attention than others. The analysis of key components of plan implementation gives the realism to policies and teeth to plans. Planning aims to create a future that is serving to the majority but not oppressive to the minority, no single approach will be universally applicable in defining what public interest is irrespective of the location or scale and characteristics of the area of study. This will therefore have to involve a combination of personal judgement, social consultation, public participation and political involvement. In conclusion, it is important when planning to realise there is no perfect policy which can fit all no matter how much consultation is made. The aim is therefore to have what is acceptable by a majority and does much to address the needs of the minority. REFLECTION Planning has been analysed to show that it is about what should be and is non empirical. A planner’s concern is to do what the society considers to be the ideal and strives to achieve. A planner brings order to the human settlements that would otherwise degenerate to chaotic arrangements if left to run on the whim of individual persons. Where planning has been done with great skill, the resulting settlements have been viewed with great admiration long after they were abandoned for other reasons that were out of control of the society in those settlements. These great achievements have been as a result of the planner’s desire to pursue the highest goals and utilise the smallest steps and benefit from the most unexpected criticisms. The feasibility of all this magnificent plans was based not on existing conditions but on possible dispositions of predictable resources that were eventually realised. The core nature of planning is in the fact that planning seeks to avoid certain possible outcomes while promoting the possible happenings of others. Planning therefore is targeted to be a resource and timing saving strategy of any population that seeks to be better and rewarding in its existence. Planning has to contend with changing objective as the society in which they are meant to be implemented in changes. The planner is therefore faced with an additional task of understanding the basics of human behavioural and cultural changes. This is a fact of life that planners have come to live with; that it is not possible to give absolute predictions of human behaviour. However with great improvements in statistical technology, more data is analysed and the world is slowly becoming homogeneous in its trends. This will bring about changes in planning of cities and towns to a standardised form where people are expected to demand what has been observed to be the best practises in other parts of the world that have undergone similar transformation. This was something that society could not do before the present information age when travelling was the almost sole way of being informed of developments in far way places. Values of the previous generations are expected to be changing more drastically than in the past. With more prediction tools being developed day by day, it is a challenge for the planners and designers to make the right choice of the tool to use to analyse the information and compare it with what other tools proposed could happen. With increase in populations of the world in general and increasingly limited resources, planning is becoming every government’s key agenda for it to sustain its people. This has resulted in more conflicts that planners have to contend with as government view each other with suspicions over the final outcome of each other’s plans of resource mining, use and distribution. All these add to forces that the planner has to include in the modern day planning. It is therefore important for all planners to realise even though prediction tools critical for planning are improving at high rates, the problem presented by humanity that greatly affect planning outcomes have also become more complex and unpredictable with ever increase in resource scarcity, a key component in any planning and design. Read More