Strategic Urban Planning
The general objectives of strategic urban planning (SUP) include clarifying which city model is desired and working towards that goal, coordinating public and private efforts, channelling energy, adapting to new circumstances and improving the living conditions of the citizens affected.
Strategic planning is a technique that has been applied to many facets of human activity; we have only to mention Sun Tzu, Arthur Thomson or Henry Mintzberg; however, the application of strategic planning to urban contexts, or cities, regions and other metropolitan areas is a relatively recent development whose beginnings were eminently practical and artistical: a mixture of thought, techniques and art or expertise.
Fifteen years of practice proved to be enough time for the technique to spread and for the first “Meeting of American and European cities for the Exchange of Experiences in Strategic Planning” to be organized. Institutions sponsoring the meeting, held in Barcelona in 1993, included the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Community Commission and the Iberoamerican Cooperation Institute. The cities of Amsterdam, Lisbon, Lille, Barcelona, Toronto and Santiago de Chile participated, among others.
At that meeting it was demonstrated, along with other relevant aspects, that if cooperative processes are used in large cities in order to carry out strategic planning processes, and if a reasonable degree of comprehension is reached between the administration, businesses and an ample representation of social agents, organizational synergies will develop that will eventually improve resource management and citizens’ quality of life.
Read more about Strategic Urban Planning: History, Description of SUP Processes, Basic Stages of An SUP Process, Implementation of SUP Processes, Critical Comments On SUP Processes, Theoretical Development, Bibliography, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words strategic, urban and/or planning:
“Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)
“My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)