Beyond Regulation: Implementing Comprehensive Plans in the New Millennium

Abstract

Local governments have historically relied on regulatory tools-primarily zoning and subdivision controls-to implement comprehensive plans. As we examine the results, we find that those tools have been very effective in helping to preserve established neighborhoods and even, in many cases, to guide the creation of new ones. They have largely failed, however, as tools for managing change in the urban core and on the urban fringe. Devastated downtowns, decaying neigh-borhoods, obliterated open space, and the many effects of sprawl are tangible evidence to most citizens that planning, as practiced in this century, has failed in many ways.