Metropolitan Planning and the New Comprehensiveness

The kind of comprehensive metropolitan planning that had become “traditional” in the United States by 1967 tended to be physical in scope, detached from decision-making, and technically and administratively primitive. Recent events are producing a “new” practice which, in addition to being politically involved, will have a greatly widened prescriptive scope that spans the total range of metropolitan-scale facilities, services, aids, and regulations. A number of technical imperatives are suggested to meet the operational demands of this “new” practice. They are based on the premise that determinate metropolitan development plans are analytically manageable and politically relevant.