The Local Regulation of Climate Change

This article discusses the importance of measuring the greenhouse gas (GHG) effects of urban and regional planning and policy in order to develop and implement policies to reduce GHG emissions. It argues that existing local government GHG measurement methods fail to support the local governments in their evaluation of policy design and the GHG reductions resulting from their policies. The article highlights the need for a large amount of observational data, from different locations and different times, as well as for control variables in order to disentangle local policy effects from nonpolicy and extra-local effects.

Frontiers in Land Use and Travel Research

This article examines research concerning land use and travel behavior in relation to urban planning. It summarizes the standard approach to studying land use and travel behavior, and identifies the key issues that should be the focus of planning research going forward. The analysis reveals that the literature on land use and travel behavior has so far focused almost exclusively on hypothesis tests regarding the association between the built environment and travel, and on the magnitude of the associations.

Planning for Improved Air Quality and Environmental Health

This article focuses on the issue of improving air quality and environmental health in urban planning. It suggests that the planning assumptions about emissions reductions, air quality, and climate change may reflect more wishful thinking and project marketing than effective air quality and climate planning, and argues that the goal of planning analysis in air quality seldom, if ever, considers neighborhoods or people. The article also compares and contrasts current planning and regulatory approaches with how community and environmental justice advocates frame air-quality issues.

The Politics of Planning

This article examines the political aspect of urban planning. It discusses Robert Beauregard's opinion that planning should not reject modernism entirely or unconditionally embrace postmodernism, and that planners should instead maintain a focus on the city and the built environment as a way of retaining relevancy and coherence, and should maintain modernism's commitment to political reform and to planning's meditative role within the state, labor, and capital. The article suggests that planners should also advocate utopian social justice visions for cities which are not so far-fetched as to be unrealizable so that planning can then attach itself to widespread values such as democracy, the common good, or equality.

Modeling Urban Systems

This article examines the different types of urban model used in urban planning in North America, and to a lesser extent, in Europe, Asia, and South Americam, which include the population-projection models, economic base models, hedonic price models, and travel-behavior models. It describes emerging procedures such as land-use change and urban-growth models, and looks at Charles Tiebout's model of efficient public choice and Thomas Schelling's model of spatial segregation.

City Abandonment

This article examines the state of knowledge about how urban planning can comprehend and address the issues facing cities with extensive residential disinvestment and abandonment. It analyses why planning rarely addresses issues facing the most abandoned areas of cities, except to encourage growth and redevelopment, and how planners can think about or understand the causes of widespread urban abandonment. The article suggests that the principles of efficiency and equity can provide guidance for planners' interventions, and discusses the future of planning in the context of abandonment.

Gender, Cities, and Planning

This article reviews some of the historical contributions of feminist urban scholarship. It identifies three areas for elaborated and intertwined research and improved planning, including gender and urban politics, and planning processes, gender and the home/housing, and gender and health. The article suggests that the contributions of feminist material analyses of urban politics and planning, home and housing, and health not only made gender and urban inequalities visible, but also helped us to better comprehend and transform cities.

Urban Planning and Regulation: The Challenge of The Market

This article examines the role of urban planning and regulation in addressing the challenge of the market. It argues that the shifts in state–market relations are important for understanding urban-planning discourses, which too often are isolated from larger questions of political ideology, global economic conditions, and geographical variations in national culture. The article also suggests that intellectual debates about the proper role of public planning in regulating private market activities are best understood in historical and geographical contexts rather than as abstract philosophical statements conducted outside the crisis-induced pressures of time and place.

Evolving Perspectives on the Arts, Place, and Development

This article discusses the evolving role of art and culture in urban planning and economic development. It explains that the cultural industries attract skilled labor, generate tourist dollars, and produce jobs and revenue in their own right. The article argues that while the use of unconventional modes and institutions in the industrial activities of the arts hinder research, they also enable us to apply innovative techniques and theories from other disciplines in our efforts to study art and culture.

Preservation

This article discusses historic preservation, one of the key goals of urban planning. It explains that the intention of contemporary historic preservation is to preserve landscapes that are perhaps less aesthetic, yet representative of, various periods of urban development, which makes for an emotional connection with the lives of the community members who lived through their history, and who remember their history in that place. The article identifies the problems related to the preservation of historic buildings and describes how preservation planning has expanded from architecture to landscape, and how it became an avenue for economic development rather than its antithesis.