Ordering Change and Changing Orders: A Study of Urban Policy Development

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Abstract
Planning, it has been suggested, should serve as a framework for steering urban policy. The extent to which this prescriptive ideal has been realized in practice is a debatable point but it can be safely maintained that planning is becoming an increasingly important strand in the process of making policy at the urban level. One of the principal justifications for city planning is in fact that it aids policy-makers in their attempt to beneficially order urban development in a way which would simply not occur as a result of nondirected, random change. From this perspective planning derives much of its utility from the fact that it confers order on the city at various geographical levels by means of a concerted range of operating programmes. More accurately, it might be maintained that planning helps to assist in the long-term realisation in spatial and functional terms of a consciously ordered state of affairs for an urban area, while at the same time providing a parallel set of ‘ordered opportunities’ for the area’s inhabitants. Rarely however is either the central concept of order itself or the way in which it could be put into practice considered in any detail.

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