This book concludes with a discussion of Montgomery County's contribution to understanding planning politics. Montgomery's experience highlights the complementary roles and reasoning processes of planners and politicians as they sought to act in the public interest. One of the most valuable lessons planners and political leaders can take from Montgomery's cases is the importance of persistence in land use policy. This is evident in the General Plan, the Agricultural Reserve, and Silver Spring. Furthermore, Montgomery shows that planning matters even if planning politics is hard. This conclusion argues that planning for the next half-century will require a fusion of traditional land use planning with a broader capacity for rethinking Montgomery's role in the metropolitan, state, national, and world political economies. It ends by speculating on the county's future.
Abandonment of traditional land use and climate change threaten the survival of an endangered relict butterfly species