Assessing and Interpreting Non-conformance in Land-use Planning Implementation

Planners studying implementation continue to search for better ways to determine whether and how well plans have been implemented. Even when we can identify areas of non-conformance between plans and outcomes, it can be unclear how to interpret them. This paper presents a conformance-based framework for evaluating plan implementation based on a GIS comparison of planned versus actual land use. This method is especially useful for making distinctions between instances of non-conformance that are benign artifacts of the development process and those that suggest the presence of breakdowns in the planning process.