Land-use planning

Even so, the practice remains controversial today, particularly in its impact on economic and racial segregation, as some critics argue that zoning has often been used to exclude certain populations from particular neighborhoods.

Conventional zoning has not typically regarded the manner in which buildings relate to one another or the public spaces around them, but rather has provided a pragmatic system for mapping jurisdictions according to permitted land use.

The urban sprawl that most US cities began to experience in the mid-twentieth century was, in part, created by a flat approach to land use regulations.

They strained commercial corridors and affected housing prices, causing citizens to fear a decline in the social, economic and environmental attributes that defined their quality of life.

The territorial diagnosis and the generation of alternatives of management and environmental protection for the planning of the use of the land produces the indispensable knowledge necessary for the formulation of the policies of use, contributing to the search of competitive and sustainable productive and extractive activities and systems.

That is, the land resource is recognized as an essential element, which supports the social, political and economic formation of society.

In a broader sense, this is a tool through which State defines the type of use land will have within a settlement, e.g. a city, while also determining the guidelines for its use in order to ensure effectiveness and sustainability.

Land use, in this case, is assigned on the basis on its physical and functional characteristics that they have in the urban structure, and with the aim of occupying the space in an orderly manner and according to their physical capacity (occupation of areas suitable for urban development and environmental sustainability), which finally it translates into a harmonious growth of the city.

Here, the authorities involved might formulate a number of restrictions to guarantee sustainability, for example, banning land development in riparian zones or in national parks.

Throughout the world, there are rising levels of environmental degradation due to unclean energy usage in the development and powering of cities and neighborhoods.

[14] The type of energy used for this was either coal or oil fuel, which meant that the environment was disregarded and damaged by numerous urban development projects.

[17] These programs have made important strides in sustainable urban planning, with about 40 percent of U.S. citizens now having access to communities who were awarded these grants.

It is becoming more widely understood that any sector of land has a certain capacity for supporting human, animal, and vegetative life in harmony, and that upsetting this balance has dire consequences on the environment.

Planners and citizens often take on an advocacy role during the planning process in an attempt to influence public policy.

[6] Since the 1990s, the activist/environmentalist approach to planning has grown into the Smart Growth movement, characterized by the focus on more sustainable and less environmentally damaging forms of development.

For example, whilst most of the urban planners suggest the distance from the landfill that a housing estate should be built, they must also take wind direction into consideration [20] Smart growth supports the integration of mixed land uses into communities as a critical component of achieving better places to live.

Putting uses in close proximity to one another has benefits for transportation alternatives to driving, security, community cohesiveness, local economies, and general quality of life issues.

Smart growth strives to provide a means for communities to alter the planning context which currently renders mixed land uses illegal in most of the country.

A charrette is a facilitated planning workshop often used by professional planners to gather information from their clients and the public about the project at hand.

The court decision in the case Commonwealth v. Alger was related to land use planning and dealt with the construction of a wharf on privately owned tidelands around Boston Harbor.

Effective measures have been put in place to limit the impact of human activities on the many water bodies in this city such as restricting land development in riparian areas.

[26] Since European settlers first began colonizing the American Continent, Indigenous peoples have lost 98.9% of their land, a Yale study found.

[28] This plan, which has been extensively researched, can serve as an excellent model for other Indigenous Nations, and for cities and areas across North America.

[30] Many of the assumptions about land use planning do not hold true elsewhere in the world, especially as developing nations face urbanization at a more rapid scale than most countries in the Global North.

In India, for example, land use planning, specifically as it pertains to siting industries, has been incorporated into the nation's constitution, and is controlled by the State and Federal levels of government.

[31] Due to the increasing discussions in the issues of climate change and global warming, the future of land use planning will be dominated by environmental sustainability themes more than economic convenience.

[32] Also, due to the fact that the world is quickly urbanizing, and this massive population growth is mostly occurring in cities in the Global South, some of the assumptions we have formed about land use planning must be reimagined, as common theory and practice is no longer always relevant to those cities that are currently practicing land use planning.