In the paper ‘New Directions in Planning Theory’ written by
Susan S Fainstein outlines the three major new directions of Urban and Regional
planning these three new directions in planning theory are the communicative
model, the new urbanism and the just city.
The Communicative Model
The communicative model is just that its communication, it’s
the pragmatic model, knowledge is derived from experience; it involves rational
communication and provides information to all participants so no one groups
dominates and everyone can have a say and get a wide range of views out on the
table and hopefully you end up with the best result for the community, social
structures and economics for the area. This theory does have flaws though, it
does not take in to account powerful groups being involved in the process, it
doesn’t believe that bureaucratic model may produce a desirable result and this
theory takes a long time to receive tangible results.
The New Urbanism
The new urbanism isn’t really a new planning theory its old planning theory new urbanism is
going back to the pre post world war era when sprawl began and cars and fuel
were cheap, cities were polluted and rich people moved to the fringes to get a
higher standard of living. Now we see issues with sprawl and that sort of
planning it’s much better when a facilities, amenities, recreation, community,
home and employment are within walking distances it cuts down pollution and
congestion and increases the quality of community and economy and this
essentially is ‘New Urbanism’ . New
urbanism isn’t necessarily good if proper consultation with the community
doesn’t take place people feel not involved and marginalised and as a result
the crime rate may rise and they environment will worsen.
The Just City
The author of this paper Susan S Fainstein is a real
advocate for just cities so this creates a bias in the writing of the paper but
‘the Just City’ is just that a just city. The just city is an ideology is a
city of a utopia, it is heavily politicised and a radical plan. It’s
essentially planners trying to create their image of a perfect city which on
the face looks good but has many problems in practice. The positives of this
city are it is a utopia, it has perfect equity of all people in the city,
everyone has the same rights and participation is encouraged. The flaws in this
planning theory is that an ideal city is subjective everyone has a different
view so it’s hard to design and it has a definite focus on the upper and middle
classes and does not affect the people its most important to the lower class.
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