Planning Regional Futures is an intellectual call to engage planners to critically explore what planning is, and should be, in how cities and regions are planned. This is in a context where planning is seen to face powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually and practically – in ways arguably not seen before: planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but opened-up to a diverse group of actors; the link between the study of cities and regions, which traditionally had a disciplinary home in planning schools and the like, steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in interdisciplinary research institutes; the advent of real-time modelling posing fundamental challenges for the type of long-term perspective that planning has traditionally afforded; ‘regional planning’ and its mixed record of achievement; and, the link between ‘region’ and ‘planning’ becoming decoupled as alternative regional (and other spatial) approaches to planning have emerged. This book takes up the intellectual and practical challenge of planning regional futures, moving beyond the narrow confines of existing debate and providing a forum for debating what planning is, and should be, for in how we plan cities and regions. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

Papers presented at the All-India Seminar on Regional Development and Planning, held at Mysore during 9-11 October 1967.

The Regional Plan Association has produced four comprehensive regional plans for the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut metropolitan region since its foundation in 1922. This book examines the evolving role of design in the first three plans and presents the design initiatives of the Fourth Regional Plan (2017) in depth. The new plan seeks to shift the focus of regional planning from a traditional center-to-periphery hierarchy to an expanded notion of "corridor" that includes transportation, ecology, access and equity. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, this collaborative initiative of the Regional Plan Association, Princeton University, and four innovative design teams produced design proposals for four regional corridors: the Highlands (forest corridor), the Bight (coastal corridor), the Inner Ring (suburban corridor) and the Triboro (city corridor). Looking forward to 2040, the Fourth Regional Plan imagines a transformed and vital future for parts of the New York City metro area that are little understood and often overlooked. Paul Lewis is a principal at LTL Architects, New York, and Professor and Associate Dean at Princeton University School of Architecture. Guy Nordenson is a structural engineer at Guy Nordenson and Associates, New York, and Professor of Architecture and Structural Engineering at Princeton University. Catherine Seavitt is a landscape architect at Catherine Seavitt Studio, New York, and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York.