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Development of Plannig Cultures

The planning culture in many couttries has shifted from a design centric practice led by a small group of professionals to a much broader social activites involving general public throughout the process.

Planning cultures reflect social attitutes of public toward the state, market, civial society and other appects wiht relation to how a society functions. Planning cultures evolve along with the industrialization process and advancement of societies. Prior to the World War II, planning was considered as a city beatification movement proposed by architects and politicians. The planning concept was conceived in the European countries in an attempt provide the city managers a reference to develop new neighborhoods and towns out side of the urban core in the industrialization period. After World War II, the planning expanded from improvement of architectures to include many social elements, such as economy, historic conjunctions, religious beliefs, and public policies. Those social factors have more and more influences toward how the urban infrastructures develop.

The golden yeas for the formation of planning cultures were the 1940s and 1950s in the global rebuilding period after World War II. The planning cultures emerged from the planning practices as pubic became more and more aware of the impact of the practices. During this period, planners also started to take into consideration of the possible impact of planning practices to the public, and the planning efforts stated to shift from building functional and aesthetic architectures to analytical and rational development approaches to resolve issues facing a city or a region, even a state.  

Starting from the 1960s, the traditionally “top-down” and “ state-centered” planning paradigm was criticized as being not adaptive, unresponsive in dealing with complex issues in local level. Thus, planning practice in many industrialized nations was seen a shift to be “bottom-up” and “people centered” .During this transitional period, planning evolved from its original object of providing solutions for special issues to a much more comprehensive goal of addressing socioeconomic related challenges.  The evolving effort was to explore a more efficient, flexible and accountable options for those socioeconomic challenges. As planning culture in industrialized states became more inclusive and aware of problems in environment, social equality, multiculturalism and other non-spatial specific issues, planners felt necessary to observe their professional views in order to engage with general public and to search common ground across public in different background and interest groupsIn the same period, some developing counties maintained its “top-down” paradigm in planning, such as China, Cuba and Iran.  The planning in those counties still had some kind of strategy and an emphasis on comprehensive planning approach.  However, the planning practices in those developing counties were headed to different directions.