What is Urban and Regional Planning?

Urban planning, design and regulation of the uses of space that focus on the physical
form, economic functions, and social impacts of the urban environment and on the location of
different activities within it.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-planning

http://altitudelandco.com/urban-planning-portfolio/

Regional planning

A profession which began in the United States in the 1970s whose central focus was the
physical environment of cities and regions. Includes forces that shape the environment, plans
and policies to ease and eliminate urban and regional problems, and availability of government
and private resources. The purpose is to integrate the physical, social, economic, and political
aspects of community development in finding solutions to urban and regional problems.

https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/regional+planning

http://www.ca-city.com/approach/regional.html
History of Urban and Regional Planning

Urban Planning

Cities (well, villages initially) emerged 7,000 to 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and
elsewhere from the need to trade products and for people to be able to interact frequently as a
result of the emergence of agriculture (as opposed to hunting and gathering). That same
imperative for commerce and communication is why cities have become the driving force behind
most human progress to date; it will continue to drive the evolution of civilization worldwide well
into the future. Creating that capacity for interaction is where the innovative solutions to the
problems we confront today will come from.
But why can’t that just happen on its’ own? Good question; there are clearly many
examples of great urban places that were not “planned.” However, even before there was a
planning profession, in the last several hundred years humans have increasingly recognized the
difficulty of forming healthy, efficient, prosperous and, yes, beautiful urban places without a
great deal of forethought.

This awareness, and the efforts that sprang from it, produced many of the great spaces
of European and other cities around the world that we admire so much. In this country, the
planning profession was essentially born in Chicago as part of the City Beautiful Movement,
most fully expressed at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. By the late 1800s, leaders in many
growing urban areas realized something needed to change. Their cities were places of wealth
and energy — but also grossly inefficient and unhealthy places to live and work, to say nothing
of recreate. While the fair provided an interesting glimpse of what a city of the future could
become, it only lasted a few months. But it did plant the seed for those who wanted to create a
better future for their urban places.

http://djcoregon.com/news/2012/07/13/a-brief-history-of-urban-planning/
Regional Planning

Regional planning first appeared in the Toronto metropolitan region during the Second
World War, as a direct outcome of wartime attitudes and circumstances. That is not to say
regional thinking began at this time. The City of Toronto’s many connections to its hinterland
had been obvious for years. Even before the First World War, Toronto City Council had
considered setting up a political structure that reflected these connections. In the 1920s the
matter gained more attention, as the urbanization of land outside Toronto’s boundaries — and
Toronto’s refusal to incorporate these areas into the city — was raising new problems and
questions. Several times in the interwar years the provincial government explored the possibility
of introducing some sort of metropolitan coordination or revenue-sharing to make the delivery of
public services in the region fairer and more efficient, but for various reasons it never took
action.4 The problem of metropolitan or regional governance, in other words, had been a
concern for several decades.

But it was the war that brought planning — that hard-to-define, somewhat utopian,
activity of devising government policies and regulations to shape the future for the betterment of
all — to the fore in the Toronto metropolitan region. There appear to be two reasons for this,
one specific to the Toronto area, and one more widely applicable.

The 1943 Master Plan

It was at this time, 1943, that Toronto’s first regional plan appeared, the product of a
group of consultants working under the auspices of the Toronto City Planning Board. The
coincidence of this 1943 plan with the growing appeal of planning and the leftward drift in
Ontario politics is, however, a bit misleading. The full impact of the new wartime circumstances
was just starting to be felt in 1942, when the planning board was established and the plan
commissioned.5 And although the plan has a metropolitan scope, its focus is clearly on the City
of Toronto, which had its own problems to worry about, not all of which were directly connected
to the war. Not until the end of the war, and even more in the immediate postwar years, did the
new spirit of planning fully manifest itself.

Nevertheless, the 1943 “Master Plan for the City of Toronto and Environs” is a
reasonable place to start. Quite apart from whether or not it was spawned by the war, nothing
on such a metropolitan scale had ever been done in Toronto before. It was an impressive piece
of work. Much of the plan was concerned with improving the City itself — modernizing the
downtown, adding parks and open space, and renewing the city’s declining areas — but it also
touched on several important regional matters. It foresaw a substantial expansion of the
suburban areas around the city and proposed to keep that growth within a contiguous, fairly
compact area in which the new “neighbourhood” style of residential development, with curved
streets and plentiful open space, would be employed. It called for a network of superhighways
and rapid transit lines in both the existing city and the new suburbs. It also proposed inner and
outer greenbelts — we now know the latter as the Oak Ridges Moraine.

http://www.neptis.org/publications/growth-plan-greater-golden-horseshoe-historical-
perspective/chapters/birth-regional