ABSTRACT
Planning is a complex discipline, with more than one body of terminology, multiple interpretations, and manifold applications through space and over time, and historians have commented on it from a variety of perspectives. Urban planning, city planning, town planning, urban design—practitioners and scholars working in English use numerous terms to describe the design and regulation of spaces, their physical form, and their use, function, and impact. Other languages and traditions further describe and categorize these activities in various and often diverging ways. The variety of terms and concepts used to describe planning history and historiography—captured in this book and illustrated in a word cloud—exemplifies the complexity of the topic and the multiplicity of approaches and disciplines (Figure 1.1). As diverse and multiple are the actors that contribute to it and the methodologies and the tools they use. Politicians, economists, planners, and urban designers have shaped physical spaces through many kinds of interventions, considering planning variously as an aesthetic, economic, political, or even engineering endeavor. Different planning approaches can coexist in a single city: whereas the design of ports can be the result of economic needs and engineering planning, the design of a representative government district might be the result of political interests and aesthetic planning, and revitalization of a former industrial site may focus on social needs and multifunctional use. Planning also varies in different national and cultural contexts, from Soviet-era five-year plans that translated into spatial development, to building plans from social engineers that resulted in urban forms, to City Beautiful-type New Urbanism. These contexts shape planning practice, as well as planning education and planning history.
