Neighborhood Planning: Limits and Potentials

Abstract

Planners have always emphasized the importance of the neighborhood unit. Ebenezer Howard’s garden city was essentially a confederation of neighborhoods (Fishman, 1982). Traditional residential land use planning has consistently demarcated areas, usually centered on a primary school, that were expected to constitute the focus of people’s everyday lives. But planning for neighborhoods typically occurred within the context of the comprehensive master plan, was conducted by centrally located planners and tended to replicate facilities and design characteristics from one neighborhood to the next. Since most planning concerned itself with development criteria for unoccupied land, the views of neighborhood residents were imputed rather than presented. It was not until urban redevelopment became a focus of planning that existing neighborhoods sought to influence the process and the uniqueness of urban sub-units — defined socially as well as geographically and architecturally — became an issue.