A changing picture of cities and their planning

摘要

There is an inevitable tension in any professional field between its intellectual base and its practice. In environment and planning, this tension surfaces in terms of the differences between the skills required to understand the system of interest-the city, its region, or some related artefact of its physical and social existence-and the professionalism required to change the system in some purposive way, through policies and plans. One hundred years ago cities and their plans were seen as two sides of the same coin, with cities being defined almost exclusively in terms of problems that needed addressing.