Urban planning: local development plan defects- part 4

Urban planning: local development plan defects- part 4 is the fourth article of a series of articles. Local development plan – part 4 is concerned with the second element of the new approach of building local development plan, Needs. You can refer to the first element in my previous article here.

NEEDS

Planners should identify needs accurately to produce correct predictions. In the conventional plan-making process, officials and public sector planners focus on people’s needs. The planning work focus is unemployment in the city and the possible ways to create jobs. Based on that, all the plan is built on whether new educational institutions are needed, housing projects, infrastructure, and what sector of the city need more attention like environment or transport or even new policy. Here the problem, as mentioned earlier, is that public fund is always required to support this plan. Many development proposals in the local development plan do not see the light because of public fund shortages.

In this new approach to building a local development plan, an accurate assessment of needs, whether it is a regulation, management, operations, skills, courses, and policy needs, is a prerequisite. This assessment considers and builds on the first part of the plan, which is defining resources and related agencies in the city. A quick return to the resources in a city could be:

Natural: a city is composed of various resources related to land, water surface, and atmosphere. Landscape and national parks are components of land resources that could be used in the tourism sector. Oasis, lakes, ponds, rivers, and any water surface could be a source of material for an industry like fisheries and any creatures that could be a source for human use. Natural forces in rivers and adjacent oceans could be used in the energy sector as clean energy to produce electricity. Nowadays, the public and private sector have extended their search for materials in deep oceans like precious minerals entering the mobile manufacturing sector. Natural materials that supply the manufacturing industry for building construction like mud, gravel, stone, wood, soda ash and limestone, and even leftover harvesting foliage for the fertilizer industry.

Transformed: is the resources created by humans as technology base resources. Software’s and programs used in various sectors like engineering structures like STAD, environment simulations programs, and transport modeling programs like CUBE land. Apps created to support the telecommunication industry and apps for social communication like LINE. Robots used in the car manufacturing industry and critical areas of work like steel factories and nuclear plants. Any resource supports the publication industry, like encouraging writing and producing artworks.

Cultural: many cities in the world are rich in their cultural context in terms of historical and heritage physical objects. Not only that, the cultural events held every year give the city a unique style like Le Tour de France. Not every city in the world has a historical building becomes a source of attraction for visitors. Specialists should carry out an assessment of the heritage and historical buildings that compose a high value that could be used as a resource for attracting visitors to the city.

Institutional: there are two types of institutions public and private research centers and universities.

Hereafter defining the types of resources, what needs to be done, is to assess the economic sectors related to these resources and what are the exact needs for each. Accordingly, planners to prepare a checklist of all these sectors to highlight what of these sectors generate money for the city becomes a priority. Economic sectors in the city may face deprivation because of many factors such as management, operations, sales, marketing, and labor problems. The most important thing is to define the economic sectors that do not require but only a small amount of public funds to retrieve their operations and workability as long as it is part of a business cluster. For example, in many cities in the European world, agriculture changed its approach in cultivation and using fertilizer in farming. In France, many products are labeled BIO, referring to the natural cultivation using even natural fertilizer coming from harvesting waste of wheat, corn, barley, and other grain corp. These types of products (BIO) are double the price of conventional products.

Open parks and public green spaces containing water surfaces, as per my observations, also are an important part of the city. However, in Europe, these places are open access to the public; due to high usage, they require continuous maintenance and support (see figure 1). Communities, with the support of the public sector, could handle places in the city like these to maintain these areas through volunteer campaign works carried out by youth in the city.

Other than that, historic buildings that do not carry much weight in terms of historical value should not receive much attention or financial support. These buildings should be offered to developers to maintain, convert to whatever function suitable for them as long as it completes the business cluster in the area for a reasonable lease, and to support business in the area during the maintenance.

The old plans witnessed great intervention from the public sector in the excuse to manage, control, and solve the problems in the market operations, especially for affordable housing. As housing, whether its homes or apartments, relate directly to the economic cycle, the cause of its positive movement should not be controlled totally by the public sector for various reasons. In many cases, related planners face inaccurate market analysis and forecast, the limited or unavailable funds at the time of need, liberating people from being forced to live in a home that they do not like and people who want to live in a specific location that keeps their ties to their families, relatives, friends, neighbors, and so on. These factors should be highly regarded and considered. The housing development for individuals should be left to them to decide what type of home, what budget to allocate, what location to build, and what time to build it. The public sector should direct developers regarding planning regulations and requirements, home architectural style, plot coverage, build-up area, vehicle access locations, and gate-level entry. Housing provided by the public sector creates big burden on public funds; they must be freed from giving a huge amount of public funds in unnecessary times that they could use for economic activity and cycle stability in the city.