If Planning Includes Too Much, Maybe It Should Include More

Abstract The guiding principle of urban and regional planning is that the field and profession should nurture healthy people in healthy places. Planning should expand, relying on this principle, because other professions are ill prepared, by their conceptual foundations, for leadership. Public administrators and policy analysts have an essentially nonspatial education, with excessive reliance on microeconomics. Architects and landscape architects lack conceptual grounding in social, economic, and political processes. Planning should expand conceptually by addressing four dimensions of people in places— area and power, satisfactory population mix, patterns and density, and space and place. Planning should expand professionally in one direction by evaluating revenue and expenditure priorities and expand in another direction into spatial design, sharing these roles with other professions.