The Fall and Rise of Physical Planning
Planning is a broad field that emerged as a response to the growth of cities following the industrial revolution. At first linked closely to design fields such as architecture and landscape architecture, planning moved toward government and administration in the middle of the 20th century and embraced the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. Planning programs in universities developed social science-based doctoral programs and professional programs that required extensive training in policy analysis and social science methods. The dominant philosophy of planning education became, to use Harvey Perloff’s term, a generalist with a specialty. Many of these specialties were policy oriented—transportation, economic development, housing, regional planning, and social and environmental areas of study.
In the 1990s, the success of big revitalization projects and new rounds of criticisms of sprawl created renewed interest in what is called physical planning—urban design and land use planning—both among the general public and in city and regional planning. After decades of being a minor specialization in planning, urban design,the design of the urban environment beyond the scale of the building, was increasingly seen as an important area of concentration for US planning practice as well as for architecture and landscape architecture. Land use planning, a traditional bread-and-butter core of the field, broadened its scope beyond traditional comprehensive planning to embrace new approaches to organizing the use of land focused on emerging issues such as protecting the environment and creating a sense of place in a globalizing world.
In this period, new fashions have emerged in planning practice including new urbanism, conservation development, ecological design, community visioning, and context sensitive transportation planning. Some practitioners have taken up these new ideas rather uncritically. However, others have maintained a critical edge informed by the years of increasing sophistication among planners in terms of ethics and analysis. Planners have increasingly