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Urban Planning: Methods and Technologies

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From Klosterman, R.E., 2015. Urban Planning: Methods and Technologies. In: James D.
Wright (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral
Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol 24. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 889–893.
ISBN: 9780080970868
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.
Elsevier
 Author's personal copy
Urban Planning: Methods and Technologies
Richard E Klosterman, What if?, Inc., Hudson, OH, USA
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
The collection, analysis, and dissemination of the information needed to improve public and private decision making is one
of the major justifications for urban planning. As a result, planning methods and technologies have played a central role in
planning practice and education since the profession’s inception over 100 years ago. This article reviews the evolution of
planning methods and techniques, considers the most important technologies used in contemporary planning practice, and
speculates on the future of planning methods and technologies.
Evolution of Planning Methods and Technologies
Three relatively distinct eras can be traced in the evolution of
planning practice, methods, and techniques. The first era,
‘planning as design, characterized planning from its inception
until the 1960s. The second, ‘planning as applied science,
characterized the profession in the 1960s and 1970s. The third,
‘planning as communication, has characterized the profession
since the 1980s. The following sections examine each of these
eras and their corresponding methods and technologies in turn.
Planning as Design
The planning profession in the United States emerged at the
beginning of the twentieth century in response to the unregu-
lated urban growth and inadequate public facilities of the new
industrial city. Guided by a rather naive form of environmental
determinism, the early planners assumed a professional
responsibility for improving society through changes in the
physical environment and protecting an overarching public
interest from the presumably self-interested and uninformed
actions of elected officials and private citizens. Planners’
methods were largely intuitive methods of manual design
adapted from the profession’s institutional homes in architec-
ture and landscape architecture, taught primarily by planning
practitioners in the ubiquitous studio workshop.
By the 1950s, these largely intuitive methods had evolved
into a standard land use planning approach codified in
F. Stuart Chapin’s Urban Land Use Planning (Chapin, 1957) and
T.J. Kent’s The Urban General Plan (Kent, 1964). This model
defined planning as the preparation of a formal document
laying out a long-term, comprehensive, and general vision for
a community’s future physical development, including public
and private uses of land and related public facilities. These
plans included a summary of existing and emerging conditions
and needs, a statement of planning goals, a 20- or 30-year
development plan expressed in map form, and policies for
implementing the plan. This conception of planning continues
to dominate planning education and practice, as reflected in
the fifth edition of Chapin’s text (Berke et al., 2006).
Planning as an Applied Science
The planning profession’s attention turned in the 1960s from
the design of the physical city to new concerns with improving
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 24
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 889–893
transportation access, reducing urban blight, and improving
social and economic conditions at the urban and regional
scales. The dominant perception of the field changed from an
image of ‘planning as design’ to ‘planning as an applied science’
as new students, faculties, and departments joined the pro-
fession from outside the traditional schools of design. An
increased emphasis on quantitative methods and social science
theory led to the abandonment of the once ubiquitous design
studio for new courses in research design, statistics, and
quantitative techniques utilizing texts such as Isard’s monu-
mental Methods of Regional Analysis (Isard et al., 1960) and
Krueckeberg and Silvers’ Urban Planning Analysis (Krueckeberg
and Silvers, 1974). Planners’ professional role was now seen
as delivering unbiased, ‘objective, and politically neutral
advice to elected officials and the public and collecting and
disseminating more and better information that could inform
and improve the policy-making process.
Computers first began to be used in planning in the 1960s,
as part of a general faith in science and technology and the
emergence of new academic fields such as operations research,
urban economics, and regional science. The most notable early
attempts to use computers in planning were the ambitious and
highly visible federally funded efforts to build large-scale
metropolitan land use – transportation models and inte-
grated municipal information systems. These efforts were seen
as providing the foundations for a new ‘science’ of planning by
helping planners understand and guide the urban development
process and improve the information base for public and
private decision making (Harris, 1965; Webber, 1965).
Planners’ optimistic faith in computer technology was
severely tested in the 1970s. The pioneering efforts to develop
large-scale urban models and municipal information systems
failed spectacularly, largely as a result of their overly ambitious
goals, the limitations of available computer equipment, and
the lack of required data. Sophisticated analytic tools such as
mathematical programing which were assumed to provide the
foundations for ‘scientific planning’ were found to be largely
inappropriate for planners’ ‘wicked problems’ which are hard
to define or solve, have outcomes that are difficult to predict,
and involve considerable uncertainty (Lee, 1973; Rittel and
Webber, 1973).
The practical failure of the early computer-based urban
models reflected a more fundamental rejection of the ‘rational
planning’ model that was assumed to underlie all attempts to
use computers in planning. Planning methods and technologies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.74056-6 889
 Author's personal copy
890 Urban Planning: Methods and Technologies
that were once assumed to be ‘objective’ and politically neutral
were found inevitably to increase the power of administrators
and technical experts at the expense of those who lacked the
expertise to use them effectively. Information that appeared to
be more accurate, credible, and objective simply because it had
been generated by a computer was found to reflect politically
important choices in the selection of data, the application of
computational procedures, and the distribution of results
(Wachs, 1982). By the decade’s end, most planners had no access
to – or perceived need for – the expensive, fragile, and hard-to-use
mainframe computers of the era and continued to rely on
manual computational techniques that had changed little since
the 1950s.
Planning as Communication
Planners’ faith in computing technology was reborn in the 1980s
with the arrival of microcomputers which made computer-based
methods and techniques readily available to planners the world
over. By the century’s end, planners routinely used computers
for general-purpose office functions such as processing docu-
ments, monitoring budgets, and maintaining records. By 2010,
planners around the world routinely used geographic informa-
tion systems (GIS; to be discussed below) to process permits,
maintain land-related information, and prepare thematic maps.
Equally important, the increased availability of information
from municipal information systems and the Internet allowed
planners to quickly and easily process increasingly large quanti-
ties of spatially-related information.
Underlying these developments were new images of ‘plan-
ning as communication’ (Innes, 1995). Planners increasingly
realized that planning involves not only the collection and
distribution of numerical data and formal documents but,
more importantly, face-to-face communication with colleagues
and clients involving less traditional types of ‘information’:
stories, advice, and personal experiences. As a result, planners
began to recognize that the ways in which they transmit
information are often more important than what they say. For
example, planning forecasts could be described either as the
result of highly sophisticated computer-based procedures that
exclude nonexperts or as implementing easily understood
models and assumptions that invite public comment.
Today’s Planning Technologies
Before the advent of computers, planning data were available
only in voluminous printed volumes and paper maps that were
incomplete, inconsistent, and could only be updated manually.
Planning analysis and communication required manually
copying data from printed documents, laborious and error-
prone hand computations, and preparing text, tables, maps
and figures by hand.
Today all of this has changed. A wealth of spatially-related
data is readily available in digital form from public and
private data providers. Planners’ computer-based tools allow
them to analyze these data quickly and use them to produce
attractive documents, charts, and maps that they can easily
distribute to clients and other professionals. As a result, it is
almost impossible to conceive of planning without computers
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 889–893
and related information and communication technologies
(ICTs). The following section briefly reviews the technologies
that are most widely used by today’s planners.
Geographic Information Systems
GIS are computer systems for capturing, storing, querying,
analyzing, and displaying information about natural and built
entities and activities that can be displayed on a map. GIS are
particularly powerful analysis tools because they
consider cartographic, attribute, and topological data about
spatially related entities and activities. The cartographic data
describe where things are, that is, their location relative to
a reference system, and provide the information needed to
prepare a map. For example, the cartographic data for the lines
on a map include their location (beginning and ending points),
shape (straight or curved), type (solid, dotted, or dashed), and
color. Attribute data describe what things are, such as, their
magnitude, classification, and ownership. For example, the
attribute data for a tax assessor’s map would contain infor-
mation on the street address, use, ownership, and assessed
value for land parcels. Topological data describe spatial rela-
tionships, that is, where things are located relative to other things.
Topological relationships include: (1) adjacency, for example,
the fact that France and Poland are both next to Germany but
are not next to each other; and (2) containment, for example,
that Paris is located in France, not Germany.
GIS have proven extremely useful for a wide range of
planning applications such as analyzing and displaying
spatially related information, maintaining land-based inven-
tories, and administering permitting processes. Unfortunately
today’s GIS only consider the present and past and cannot
support planners’ particular concerns with projecting future
conditions, evaluating the long-term implications of alternative
public choices, and considering public policy goals, benefits,
and costs.
Planning Support Systems
In response to the limitations of the current generation of GIS,
the last decade has witnessed a rebirth in the development of
planning models that use the tremendous analysis and display
power of GIS and the increased availability of spatially-related
data to develop customized planning support systems (PSS)
that meet the needs of planners (see, e.g., Brail and Klosterman,
2001; Brail, 2008). The following approaches have dominated
efforts in this area: (1) large-scale urban models, (2) cellular
automata (CA) models, (3) agent-based models, and (4) rule-
based models. (Other modeling approaches are reviewed in
Trianstakonstantis and Mountrakis (2012)).
Large-Scale Urban Models
Large-scale urban models for studying the interaction between
land uses and spatial interaction first attracted planners’ atten-
tion to computer-based models in the 1960s (see, e.g., Harris,
1965). These models project future land uses, housing and
employment for zones within a metropolitan area, and the
travel by transportation mode between these zones (Miller
et al., 1999; Hunt, 2005). More sophisticated models attempt
to represent the complex interactions between land uses and
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transportation demand, the market for land and space, and the
location of households and firms over time and space. Models
of this type that have been widely implemented in practice
include DRAM/EMPAL (Putman, 1983), MEPLAN (Bertuglia
et al., 1990), TRANUS (de la Barra, 2001), and UrbanSim
(Waddell, 2002).
CA Models
CA models of urban growth have received a tremendous amount
of academic attention in recent years (Trianstakonstantis
and Mountrakis, 2012). CA models represent an urban area
with a lattice of cells, each of which exists in one of a finite
set of states; for example, ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped. The
progression of time is modeled as a series of discrete steps with
future patterns determined by transition rules that specify the
behavior of cells over time (e.g., whether a cell switches from
undeveloped to developed), as a function of conditions at each
cell and its neighboring cells at each time step. A widely used
CA model, SLEUTH, which stands for the input requirements
of the models – slope, land cover, exclusion, urbanization,
transportation, and hill shade – uses information on land uses
at two points of time to calibrate a statistical model that projects
future land use changes (Clarke, 2008).
Agent-Based Models
As their name suggests, agent-based systems attempt to model
the behavior of complex systems by representing the behavior
of the various agents that make up the system. Thus, for
example, an agent-based urban model would represent the
actions of a region’s households, firms, and land developers
who interact to buy and sell land via a simulated market. The
behavior of each of these agents is modeled, along with their
interactions with other agents and with the environment,
which together determine future urban development patterns
(Heppenstall et al., 2012).
Rule-Based Models
Rule-based models first became popular in planning with the
publication of John Landis’s landmark California Urban
Futures (CUF) model, the first GIS-based urban development
model (Landis, 1994). CUF and other rule-based models do
not attempt to duplicate the complex spatial interaction and
market clearing processes that underlie the large-scale urban
models. Instead, they incorporate explicit decision rules that
allow model users to specify how the model will behave. Thus,
for example, rule-based urban growth models such as CUF and
What if? (Klosterman, 1999) incorporate user-specified rules
for determining the relative suitability of different locations,
projecting future land use demands, and allocating projected
land use demands to suitable sites. Similarly, rule-based impact
assessment models such as CommunityViz (Walker and
Daniels, 2011) and INDEX (Allen, 2008) specify rules that
determine the impacts that proposed actions will have on
future development patterns, public infrastructure, and the like.
The Internet
The Internet and the World Wide Web (or ‘Web’) provide
a ‘network of networks’ that connect millions of computer
users around the world into a seamless web of electronic
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 889–893
Urban Planning: Methods and Technologies 891
communication and information dissemination. The Internet
has been extremely useful in providing planners and the public
with anytime, anyplace access to large databases such as the
entire contents of the national census and interactive audio
and video displays. It also allows plans and proposals to be
distributed quickly and easily, allowing people with different
skills and viewpoints to participate in the public policy-making
process, independent of time and place. The recent develop-
ment of powerful Web services promises to make a new
generation of online models and methods readily available to
planners around the world.
Today’s Planning Methods
Continued advances in the power and capabilities of modern
GIS and the availability of high-quality spatial data have stim-
ulated a revolution in the area of spatial analysis. Important
issues such as spatial autocorrelation and the modifiable area
problem which had been largely ignored in the past are
now being addressed thoroughly, and exciting new tools
and techniques for analyzing and describing spatially related
phenomena are being developed and refined (Fotheringham
and Rogerson, 2009). Unfortunately, these developments have
had little impact on planning practice and education. A host
of planning methods texts were published in the 1970s, but
only two (Klosterman, 1990; Wang and Hofe, 2007) have
been published since then. A new textbook demonstrating
how current GIS technology and traditional planning can be
used to address the realities of today’s planning is being
prepared.
The Future of Planning Methods and Technologies
Planning methods and technologies have changed dramatically
over the last 50 years, due largely to the incredible advances in
ICT that have occurred since the birth of computer-aided
planning in the 1960s. Fragile and expensive room-sized
computers and paper ‘punch cards’ have been replaced by
low cost and more powerful machines that fit into our hands.
Today’s GIS provide tools for high-quality cartography, three-
dimensional visualization, and spatial analysis that could not
be imagined a generation ago. A wealth of spatially related data
is currently available from government and commercial data
sources, increasingly via the Web. Free and easy-to-use online
mapping and route-finding tools have made spatially refer-
enced information and services a routine part of people’s lives.
The rapid development of more powerful Web services prom-
ises to make digital data and advanced computing tools
readily available to planners around the world. Perhaps most
importantly, the grand challenges of climate change, resource
depletion, and environmental degradation increasingly require
computer-based analysis, forecasting, and evaluation. Together
these trends are encouraging academic institutions, innovative
government agencies, and entrepreneurial organizations
around the world to develop and apply a new generation of
Web-based models and methods.
Nevertheless, experience has demonstrated that progress in
the field of computer-aided planning will not be quick or easy.
 Author's personal copy
892 Urban Planning: Methods and Technologies
A vast body of academic literature on computer-aided models
and methods has accumulated since computers entered plan-
ning in the 1960s (see e.g., Harris, 1985; Klosterman, 1992;
Trianstakonstantis and Mountrakis, 2012). Complex and expen-
sive integrated land use/transportation models are used
increasingly in practice, but only by well-funded academic insti-
tutions and regional transportation planning agencies. An over-
whelming array of GIS-based PSS models is being developed
around the world but most of them are academic prototypes or
‘one off’ professional applications that have not been adopted
elsewhere. A number of commercial off-the-shelf PSS have been
developed but these systems have been adopted only by a small
number of agencies and are rarely used on a routine basis.
Important obstacles can be identified that have limited the
adoption of computer-based planning models and methods
(Vonk et al., 2005; Vonk and Geertman, 2008). Academic
institutions are excellent venues for developing models but
cannot provide the long-term support required for their
continued use in professional practice. Efforts by commercial
firms to develop planning models are hindered by a vicious
circle: practitioners are understandably reluctant to adopt an
immature and poorly known technology; the limited market
for planning models restrains the ability of developers to
improve and market their tools; this completes the circle by
limiting planners’ awareness of, and willingness to adopt,
computer-based models and methods.
More fundamentally, the adoption of computer models and
methods is limited by the somewhat paradoxical fact that
today’s planners often do little planning. Planners are so
occupied by routine administrative tasks such as processing
permits, enforcing building codes, and administering regula-
tions that they all too often fail to help the communities they
serve engage an uncertain and politically contentious future. As
a result, the current effort to develop GIS-based planning
models is part of a larger effort to return the planning profession
to its traditional concern with using information and analysis to
help the public more effectively engage its collective future
(Isserman, 1985; Myers, 2001; Hopkins and Zapata, 2007).
The current effort to apply advanced ICTs to planning is also
part of a fundamental change in our image of planning and the
role that technology can play in planning research and practice.
The first generation of computer models and methods was
assumed to provide the foundations for value-neutral ‘planning
for the public’ that would allow planners, as technical experts on
the city, to understand the urban development process, accu-
rately forecast the future, and identify the best policy option,
with little need to involve the public. Today’s planning models
generally pursue new ideals of citizen-based ‘planning with the
public’ which limit planners’ role to structuring and informing
a citizen-led decision process and attempt to involve stake-
holders and private citizens in all stages of the planning process
– understanding the past and present, identifying problems,
evaluating alternative solutions, and attempting to make deci-
sions they can support (Innes, 1996). ICT can play an important
role in this effort but it will require the development of new
models and methods that allow nonexperts to understand
present and past conditions, clearly identify alternative
public policy options, and easily evaluate their implications.
We live in an era of exciting technical possibilities, an
increased appreciation for spatially referenced information,
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 889–893
widespread concern with issues such as climate change and
resource scarcity, and a growing demand for more meaningful
public participation. These demands will only increase with
the growing interdependence, complexity and uncertainty of
a rapidly urbanizing world. Dramatic advances in ICTs may
provide the technological foundations a rejuvenated profession
that will once again claim its traditional role as a source of
inspiration about what the future might – and should – be and
promote more meaningful citizen involvement. Only time and
professional practice will tell whether this potential is achieved.
See also: Finance, Geography of; Geographic Information
Systems and Remote Sensing.
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