A Planning Support System Toolkit Approach for Formulating and Evaluating Land-use Change Scenarios

Distributing land uses across space is the central problem addressed by the urban and regional planning discipline. Millions of words have been written about it, and there has been significant investment made by various planning agencies around the world trying to do it better. Nevertheless, from the time of the late-nineteenth century origins of town and country planning until around the mid-twentieth century, land-use planning was usually done in a non-analytical way, by architects and engineers who were simply content to tidy up the environment by such means as physically separating incompatible land uses and ensuring efficient servicing of them with properly distributed pipes, wires and transport arteries.