7 Types Of Urban Planning

Concepts Explained

Marisa Sailus
Strategic Planning
April 14, 2023
Urban planning is the process of developing and designing urban areas
to meet the needs of a community. The practice draws from a number of
disciplines—architecture, engineering, economics, sociology, public
health, finance, and more—and strives to prepare cities and towns for
the future. It is typically used as part of a larger city plan, and should tie
back to your city’s mission and vision statements.

Urban planning touches on numerous city-life elements—new and pre-existing land,

buildings, roads, communal spaces, transportation, economic development,
infrastructure, and the environment, among others. We’ve broadly categorized these
aspects into different conceptual areas below. These areas are commonly referred to as
types of urban planning, but it’s important to understand that they are not mutually
exclusive. In fact, a cohesive urban plan should include many or all of the below areas.

One more thing to note: Urban planning is more effective when you approach it with a
strategic lens. That means setting clear goals, measuring progress, and strategically
defining and executing projects. This is where strategy software like ClearPoint comes in
handy—to ensure that all your projects align with strategy, and help you stay on top of
timelines, milestones, and budgets.

To be clear, our software supports the execution of all types of strategic planning, but in
this article, we’ll call out some of its specific strengths as related to each of the urban
planning concepts below.

7 Types Of Urban Planning

Urban planners direct the development of cities and towns.

1. Strategic Urban Planning

Strategic urban planning focuses on setting high-level goals and determining desired
areas of growth for a city or metropolitan area. The result of the planning process is a
strategic plan—also called the development plan, core strategy, or comprehensive plan.
The strategic plan’s goals may include easing transportation throughout the city,
creating more community spaces, improving citizens’ quality of life, or encouraging
people to visit or move to the city.

This is generally the highest level of the planning process and other components of
planning typically will fit into this type of plan.

The ClearPoint advantage:

Your city likely has a variety of plans across different departments and within different
areas (public health, infrastructure, capital improvement, etc.). It can be very difficult to
see how all the pieces fit together, and to make sure everyone is working to achieve a
unified vision.

ClearPoint was designed to help you see the big picture. You can organize your overall
strategy according to themes, and easily view the objectives, initiatives, and measures
associated with each (as shown below). You can also link departmental goals, measures,
and projects directly to organizational goals and projects, so that everything forms a
single, cohesive strategic plan. ClearPoint can then be used to track and report on the
progress of your projects, making sure you bring your goals to fruition.
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2. Land-Use Planning
Land-use planning largely concerns legislation and policy, adopting planning instruments
like governmental statutes, regulations, rules, codes, and policies to influence land use.

On a broad level, these planning instruments deal with the type, location, and amount of
land needed to carry out different functions of the city. They also serve to zone or
reserve land for certain purposes such as:

Residential, for buildings like apartment homes, single-family residences, and

condominiums
Commercial, for buildings like retail shops and office buildings
Industrial, for structures like manufacturing plants and warehouses
Municipal, for structures like police stations and courthouses

As with subsequent types of urban planning, consulting with the community and relevant
stakeholders is an important part of land-use planning to ensure transparency, and
incorporate a wide range of interests into the overall plan. If you communicate your
strategic plan well, then transportation, commercial and industrial planning should flow
right into your plans.

The ClearPoint advantage:

Open and transparent decision-making is a key component of land-use planning;
ClearPoint’s robust reporting functionality supports information transparency.

You’ll likely need to share information with lots of different audiences. Once you
determine the design and data points necessary for each audience, ClearPoint takes
over, automatically generating those various reports in your preferred format—whether
it’s Excel, PDF, PPT, or HTML. It also handles report distribution and shares reports on a
specified schedule. You can elect to publish the data on your website (as shown below,
for the city of Charlottesville’s public works department) or create reports to share via
email.

Everyone will always have the information they need, whenever they need it.
3. Master Planning
Master planning is typically used for greenfield development projects, or building on
undeveloped land. Instead of modifying pre-existing structures or spaces, you’re starting
from scratch.

This type of urban planning envisions a future state for a given space, and what it will
take to achieve that vision. Urban planners must consider the required zoning (from your
land-use plan) and infrastructure (see concept 7 below) to make the project possible,
such as residential and commercial land, transportation considerations, road locations,
etc. They must also plan the location of urban amenities such as community facilities,
schools, parks, and the like.

Again, consulting with landowners and government agencies impacted by the plan is an
essential task here. Additionally, you may need to bring in professional consultants to
gather important expertise and insights, ensure the plan considers all potential angles,
and set the completed space up for success for years to come.

The ClearPoint advantage:

Developing new projects, collaborating with others, delivering on the municipality’s larger
vision… ClearPoint makes it easier to carry out every aspect of master planning. Use it to:

Evaluate and prioritize ideas.

Tie projects to high-level strategic objectives.
Create a detailed breakdown of the required tasks, building in milestones, due
dates, and collaborators.
Gather quantitative and qualitative data on progress.
Visualize project performance in auto-generated reports.

Shown below are a project detail page with milestones, and a project proposal
template, in ClearPoint.
 Master your urban planning efforts with
ClearPoint - strategy execution software that helps »
you track KPIs and achieve your goals. See it live.

4. Urban Revitalization
In contrast to master planning, urban revitalization focuses on improving areas that are in
a state of decline. The exact definition of a declining area will differ from city to city—for
example, areas that have a troubling number of failing businesses or a stagnant or
decreasing population growth. The improvement tactics city leaders use for revitalization
will depend on the root cause of decline, and may include things like repairing roads,
developing infrastructure, cleaning up pollution, and adding to parks and other public
spaces, etc.

Community interaction is especially important with this urban planning concept, as local
residents and business owners often have insights that can help inform and tailor
planning efforts. You may need to change land use (see concept #2) from industrial to
residential to get the loft apartments you want, or involve environmental planning (see
concept #6) to assess or clean up certain locations.

The ClearPoint advantage:

Again, having that big-picture view is important here. To improve areas in a state of
decline, it’s helpful to have a thorough understanding of factors that have contributed to
that decline. ClearPoint’s ability to link measures and initiatives gives you greater, more
visible insight into steps being taken to improve any given measure. So once you
complete a project—for example, repairing the sidewalks in a certain area or cleaning
up a public space—you can tell if the changes are having a direct impact on the use of
those spaces.

ClearPoint’s measure dashboard, shown below, brings all your different measure charts
together in one place, so you can see at a glance how things are changing from one
reporting period to another.

5. Economic Development
Economic development is about identifying areas of growth to foster greater financial
prosperity within the city, specifically by enticing companies to build or move offices
there. Subsequently, those companies then hire local talent and drive commuter traffic to
the new office. More workers dining at local restaurants for lunch, getting gas at nearby
gas stations, and stopping by local grocery stores on the way home will boost visibility
and spend in the area.

Sometimes an economic development department lives outside the planning

department of a municipality, so it is important to help that group navigate land use
plans, master plans, and infrastructure plans to ensure that any development projects
are workable. Of course it will be important to coordinate with environmental plans as
well.

The ClearPoint advantage:

To correctly pull all the necessary levers that support economic growth—some being
more crucial than others—you need collaboration among departments. Rather than
having data silos that limit collaboration, ClearPoint allows users to selectively share
information internally across departments, so everyone can see and understand their
department’s (and even their individual) role in it. Having that open access makes it
easier to identify areas of growth and coordinate activities. For instance, if you’re trying
to attract more people to work in your city, you might consider joining forces with the
transportation department to improve public transportation, or the infrastructure
department to implement internet of things (IoT) technology. In ClearPoint you can view
collaborating departments’ progress on goals, ascertain their capacity to take on
additional projects, and understand how their strategy converges with yours.

The image below shows a portion of a departmental scorecard in ClearPoint with links
to “parent” measures and initiatives.

6. Environmental Planning
Environmental planning is a type of strategic development that emphasizes
sustainability. Considerations for this type of urban planning include air pollution, noise
pollution, wetlands, habitats of endangered species, flood zone susceptibility, and
coastal zone erosion, along with a host of other environmental factors dealing with the
relationship between natural and human systems.

Environmental plans need to be filed alongside master, revitalization, and infrastructure

plans.

The ClearPoint advantage:

ClearPoint has the features you need to manage both your larger environmental
program and the numerous projects entailed in accomplishing those larger objectives.
You can:

Prioritize projects according to organizational goals.

 Ensure environmental programs and projects are linked to the city’s overall
strategy.
Allocate resources effectively.
Generate realistic project timelines and proper sequencing of projects.
Track progress on hundreds of projects simultaneously.
Evaluate the program’s real-time status automatically, based on the status of
linked goals, KPIs, or projects.

Gantt charts, like the one below created in ClearPoint, are useful for mapping project
timelines, start/end dates, and milestones.

7. Infrastructure Planning
Infrastructure planning deals with the fundamental facilities and systems that serve a
city and its people, and how those facilities can support goals laid out in the strategic
plan. This type of urban planning covers:

Public works infrastructure such as water supply, sewage, electricity, and

telecommunications
Community infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and parks
Safety and transportation such as roads, police, and fire facilities

The ClearPoint advantage:

Like environmental planning, infrastructure planning covers a lot of ground. ClearPoint

offers you a way to manage everything—all the plans, projects, objectives, measures,
etc.—with a single tool. That reduces the work involved because it uses a single data set
for reporting and analysis; it also makes it easy to see the linkage between programs,
projects, and organizational goals, and track progress on it all.

It also promotes consistency in your reporting—you can design multiple reports and
detail pages using the same format, making it easier for you (and your audiences) to
digest the information.
Urban Planning Examples
Good planning takes a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort. As the following examples
show, planning at the city, county, and state levels can have a positive, lasting impact on
your community.

Raleigh, North Carolina aims to improve quality of life.

Raleigh’s city planning department has a lofty goal: Create a city where the quality of
life is second to none. This goal ties directly to the city’s overall strategic plan, making
strategic urban planning a priority.

To achieve this goal and prepare for likely changes across the city, Raleigh leadership is
planning a number of different tactics, including conducting studies to evaluate the
impact of population growth. These studies inform future strategic planning, helping the
city to prioritize initiatives and allocate resources appropriately.

Many of the key focus areas of the city’s strategic plan rely on urban planning, but there
are three that stand out over the others:

Growth & Natural Resources

Safe, Vibrant & Healthy Community
Transportation & Transit

The city planning department is a key player in the success of these focus areas and the
initiatives that support them. Having a clear urban plan has allowed the city to make
improvements and be able to spread the message that Raleigh is a “great place to live,
work, and play.”

New York, New York elevates nature (and pedestrians).

New York’s High Line experiment transformed a 1930s elevated railroad into gardens
that stretch a mile and a half. Instead of tearing down the tracks, city leadership gave it
new life through careful urban planning efforts. This experiment was so successful that
it’s now a top visitor attraction—with popularity that’s been said to dwarf the famed
Statue of Liberty. Its success has also inspired other cities to recreate a similar
experience for their own citizens.

New York has included green space in all of its planning going forward, and there are
many other examples of great outdoor spaces that are giving the city a feeling of
openness in one of the most densely populated areas in the country. Waterfront parks,
the Downtown Boathouse, and Fort Tryon Park are just a few of the many spaces
available to enjoy the outdoors.

Eugene, Oregon goes green.

Urban planning tends to be environmentally focused in Eugene, which was once named
the fifth greenest city in America and the best city for urban farming. What makes the
city so green? For one, it boasts an innovative public power grid that draws 85% of its
energy from renewables. In addition, the city is very accessible by bike and hybrid
transport. Eugene also managed to meet the ambitious goal it had been working
toward for a decade: it became carbon neutral in 2020.

This isn’t Eugene just being trendy. It was known as the Emerald City since before Earth
Day was created, and part of its brand is to be green all year round. Thus, to live and
execute on that strategy, it has put in place some ambitious goals and modeled its
planning process around these goals.

Are you working within a municipality? This article on developing a municipal development
plan includes several specific planning examples for municipalities.

Bring Software To The Urban Planning Table

A well-developed, effective urban plan requires thorough research and input from
numerous stakeholders, including citizens, landowners, and government staff. Urban
planners should think about their plans from the perspectives of all who will be
impacted by their efforts. And since implementing the plan uses taxpayer dollars, the
plan should be as practical and cost-effective as possible.

ClearPoint strategy execution software can help your local government develop that
plan and reach your urban planning goals. It can also provide the transparency your
citizens are looking for, giving you a simple way to share your plans and desired
outcomes. Want to see ClearPoint in action? Get in touch with our team and we’ll show
you around!

Marisa Sailus
Implementation Specialist & Avid Spotify
Listener

Marisa helps clients achieve their strategic

and performance management goals through
effective utilization of ClearPoint.
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