5.1 Theories of planning and planning thinkers notes

1. 5.1.1Patrick Geddes: place–work–folk, survey before plan and conservative surgery

   Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, taught that a town must be studied as a living whole of place, work and folk before it is planned, and that old towns should be improved by careful, minimal "conservative surgery" rather than wholesale clearance.

   Standard · 7 min · Read here
2. 5.1.2Ebenezer Howard: the three magnets and the Garden City

   Ebenezer Howard proposed small, self-contained "garden cities" of about 32,000 people, owned in common and ringed by a permanent agricultural belt, to combine the advantages of town and country.

   Standard · 6 min · Full course
3. 5.1.3Clarence Perry's neighbourhood unit and the Radburn plan

   Clarence Perry sized a residential neighbourhood around one elementary school within walking distance, bounded by arterial roads; Stein and Wright's Radburn added the superblock and the separation of pedestrians from cars.

   Standard · 6 min · Full course
4. 5.1.4Le Corbusier and Doxiadis: Chandigarh, Gandhinagar, Islamabad and Ekistics

   Le Corbusier gave modernist planning its rigid grid, tall blocks and separated functions, realised in Chandigarh; Doxiadis created Ekistics, the science of human settlements, and planned Islamabad as a "Dynapolis" that grows in one direction.

   Standard · 7 min · Full course
5. 5.1.5Kevin Lynch, Lewis Mumford, Soria y Mata and other planning pioneers

   Exams pair each planning pioneer with one idea or book: Lynch with the five elements of the city image, Mumford with The City in History, Soria y Mata with the Linear City, Garnier with the Industrial City, Wright with Broadacre City and Jacobs with "eyes on the street".

   Standard · 7 min · Full course
6. 5.1.6Urban structure models: Burgess concentric zones, Hoyt sectors and Harris–Ullman multiple nuclei

   Three classic models explain how land uses arrange themselves in a city: in rings around the CBD (Burgess, 1925), in wedges along transport routes (Hoyt, 1939), or around several separate centres (Harris and Ullman, 1945).

   Standard · 6 min · Full course
7. 5.1.7Central place theory: Christaller and Lösch

   Christaller's central place theory (1933) explains the number, size and spacing of settlements that supply goods and services to their surrounding areas, using threshold, range and hexagonal market areas arranged on K=3, K=4 or K=7 principles.

   Standard · 6 min · Full course
8. 5.1.8Rank-size rule, primate city and urban geography terms

   The rank-size rule says the n-th largest city has 1/n of the population of the largest; a country or region whose largest city is far bigger than the rule predicts has a primate city.

   Standard · 7 min · Full course
9. 5.1.9Regional development theories: growth poles, core–periphery and cumulative causation

   Regional development theories explain why growth concentrates in some places and how it may (or may not) spread: growth poles (Perroux), cumulative causation (Myrdal), trickle-down and polarisation (Hirschman) and the core–periphery model (Friedmann).

   Standard · 7 min · Full course
10. 5.1.10Planning process theories and methods: rational, incremental, advocacy and strategic planning, SWOT, surveys and the Lorenz curve

    Planning theory asks how plans should be made: comprehensively and rationally, in small steps, through advocacy and participation, or strategically; planners support each approach with tools such as SWOT, surveys and inequality measures like the Lorenz curve.

    Standard · 8 min · Full course

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