Based on the memoirs of Aelred J. Gray, former chief planner, this book reviews how the Tennessee Valley Agency (TVA) - a world-renowned model for regional planning and development - functioned and changed through the decades. It shows how the TVA pioneered land-use planning to create state parks alongside the Tennessee river's hydro-electric power stations and dams, how it developed model towns, influenced city planning and introduced the landmark Flood Damage Prevention program.

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the fundamental methods related to planning and human services delivery. These methods aid planners in answering crucial questions about human activities within a given community. This book brings the pillars of planning methods together in an introductory text targeted towards senior level undergraduate and graduate students. Planning professionals will also find this book an invaluable reference.

This best seller for regional planners introduces the foundations and applications of their practice in the United States. It offers guidance and inspiration to help professionals and students understand local issues in a regional and global context, define planning regions based on functional problems, and collaborate across regions as never before to advance sustainability and improve quality of life.

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.

Effective practitioners in any field understand that lessons from the past underlie successes in the future. Which practices have worked before and which haven’t? What went wrong, and what does that teach us? Too often, however, urban and regional planners simply don’t know whether or how well planning policies were carried out. Evaluating Urban and Regional Plans blends theory and practice to delineate the questions that planners need to ask as they shape the future of Canadian communities. Mark Seasons offers a wealth of pragmatic guidance on comprehensive plan evaluation processes and methods. Monitoring the outputs and outcomes generated by a plan – and gauging their impact – ensures that the planning function remains relevant, and that resources are used effectively, efficiently, and equitably. As both a primer on plan evaluation practice and an original contribution to theory, Evaluating Urban and Regional Plans is an invaluable resource not only for the Canadian planning community but for planners everywhere.

Regional Planning for a Sustainable America is the first book to represent the great variety of today’s effective regional planning programs, analyzing dozens of regional initiatives across North America. The American landscape is being transformed by poorly designed, sprawling development. This sprawl—and its wasteful resource use, traffic, and pollution—does not respect arbitrary political boundaries like city limits and state borders. Yet for most of the nation, the patterns of development and conservation are shaped by fragmented, parochial local governments and property developers focused on short-term economic gain. Regional planning provides a solution, a means to manage human impacts on a large geographic scale that better matches the natural and economic forces at work. By bringing together the expertise of forty-two practitioners and academics, this book provides a practical guide to the key strategies that regional planners are using to achieve truly sustainable growth.