AR 443A_Intro to Urban and Regional Planning

Eduardo F. Bober, Jr.

Week 13_Lecture Notes
WHAT IS PLANNING?
1. Planning as a basic human activity
Basic activity that pervades human behavior at every level of society
a plan is any hierarchical process in the organism that can control the order in which a
sequence of operations is to be performed
2. Planning as a rational choice
Choice that meets certain standards of logic
a process for determining appropriate future actions through a sequence of choices
3. Planning as control of future action
The ability to control the future consequences of present actions
Plannings purpose is to make the future different from what it would have been without
this intervention.
4. Planning as a special kind of problem solving
5. Planning is what planners do
SYNTHESIS OF DEFINITIONS
What planning is NOT:
Not a purely individual activity
Personal planning vs. societal planning
Not present-oriented
Primarily concerned with future actions involving uncertainty
Need for predictions
Cannot be routinized
Has little or nothing in common with trial-and-error approaches to problem solving
Not just the imagining of desirable futures
Planning, like utopia, depicts a desirable future state of affairs,
but, unlike utopia, specifies the means for achieving it.
Planning must be:
Societal
Future-oriented
Non-routinized
Deliberate
Action-oriented
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Planning is the deliberate social or organizational activity of developing an optimal strategy for
achieving a desired set of goals

Planning aims to apply methods of rational choice to determining a best set of future actions
addressed to novel problems in complex contexts

It is attended by the power and intention to commit resources and to act as necessary to implement
the chosen strategy

RATIONALITY OF PLANNING
1. Rationality is a central feature of planning
2. Rationality is a way of choosing the best means to attain a given end
3. Rationality is a tool that enables us to make choices according to certain standards of logic
4. These standards of logic are axioms
AXIOMS OF LOGIC IN PLANNING ARE:
Preferences must be transitive
Probabilities and utilities must be independent of each other
Ones assessment of the likelihood that some event or outcome will happen (its probability)
should not be affected by the value one would assign to that even or outcome (its utility)
Unaffected outcomes are irrelevant to the choice under consideration
Inadmissibility of dominated choices
Superior option must be chosen
THE PLANNING PROCESS
Planning as sequential, multi-staged process in which many of the phases are linked to their predecessors
by feedback loops
Components are:
Problem diagnosis
Goal articulation
Prediction and projection
Alternatives development
Feasibility analysis
Evaluation
Implementation
PLANNING ROLES AND CONTEXT
Planning Models
Comprehensive planning
Social planning
Advocacy planning
Bureaucratic planning
Radical or anti-planning
Non-planning
Planners Roles
Technician-administrator
Political roles
Mediator, Entrepreneur, Advocate and guerilla

ANALYTIC TOOLS IN POLICY ANALYSIS

Systems approach
Any process or situation can be analyzed as a system
A system is defined as a set of components whose interdependencies with
one another are stronger than their relationship with other elements outside
the system.
Anything affecting one component will affect all the other components
A change in one component will result in a change in the other
components
Modeling
An abstraction or representation of the reality
Different kinds:
Iconic those that look like reality (e.g. scale model)
Analog those in which there is correspondence between elements
and action in the model and those in reality but no direct
physical resemblance (e.g. basketball play diagram)
Symbolic those that compactly and abstractly represent the
principles of reality [e.g. F = ma; y = f (x)]
Simulations
A replication, usually considerably abstracted, of a process
Are important predictive tools
EVALUATION TOOLS IN POLICY ANALYSIS
1. Benefit-Cost analysis
Benefit-cost ratio
2. Cost-Effectiveness analysis
Units of output per peso cost
3. Impact analysis
EIA
TIA
SIA

REFERENCES: Alexander, E. (1986). Approaches to Planning. Introducing Current Planning Theories,

Concepts, and Issues. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers, Switzerland.
Montalbo, C. (2012). Introduction to Planning & Policy Analysis. SURP, Philippines