New Principles in Planning Evaluation

Maintaining and enhancing living conditions in cities through a combination of physical planning and environmental management is a newly emerging focus of governments around the world. For example, local governments seek to insulate sensitive land uses such as residential areas from environmentally intrusive activities such as major transport facilities and manufacturing. Regional governments protect water quality and natural habitat by enforcing pollution controls and regulating the location of growth. Some national governments fund acquisition of strategically important sites, facilitate the renewal of brown fields, and even develop integrated environmental quality plans. This book provides recently developed and tested methods for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of planning and policy options. Several contributions focus on new substantive areas of concern in planning evaluation, including environmental justice and sustainable urban development. Applications of evaluation in several planning contexts are demonstrated, and special problems that these pose are assessed. Several chapters address how to communicate the process and results to several stakeholder groups, and how to engage these groups in the evaluation process. Each chapter employs a realworld case in practice, thus dealing with the complexity of applying planning evaluation, and providing practical advice useful in similar situations.