IF PLANNING INCLUDES TOO MUCH, MAYBE IT SHOULD INCLUDE MORE

The guiding principle of urban and regional planning is that the field and profession should nurture healthy people in healthy places. Plann ing should expand, relying on this principle, because other profession s are ill prepared, by their conceptual foundations, for leadership. P ublic administrators and policy analysts have an essentially nonspatia l education, with excessive reliance on microeconomics. Architects and landscape architects lack conceptual grounding in social, economic, a nd political processes. Planning should expand conceptually by address ing four dimensions of people in places- area and power, satisfactory population mix, patterns and density, and space and place. Planning sh ould expand professionally in one direction by evaluating revenue and expenditure priorities and expand in another direction into spatial de sign, sharing these roles with other professions.