General Plan Evaluation Criteria: An Approach to Making Better Plans

The planning profession has developed relatively few criteria for evaluating the quality of general plans. Evaluation criteria have become more important with the increasing number of states that mandate general plans. Several kinds of plan evaluation exist, and these are distinguished and described before a review of different concepts of plans as a source of the appropriate criteria to evaluate them. A list of suggested criteria for plan evaluation during plan preparation is then presented, to be used to make the plan better. Appropriate criteria for a plan are not easy to devise, and the postmodern critique of planning makes this task more difficult still. These issues are explored as well.