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On 31 October 1993 in Columbus, Ohio, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning presented its Distinguished Planning Educator Award to Melville C Branch The following comments were prepared by Professor Branch from speaking notes of his remarks in response to a reguest from the editors

All existing cities were new towns at some time in the past. Although there is a relative lack of interest in new towns in the USA today, they continue to be planned and constructed in other parts of the world. The common characteristics they exhibit constitute long-range goals for the gradual physical redevelopment of existing cities as well as shorter-range planning objectives for the superior new town.

Sound city planning requires a valid theoretical and analytical base. But our present knowledge of the functioning of urban organisms and their analysis for planning purposes does not justify the operational pretensions of city planning practitioners, nor the academic claim that city planning is as yet an intellectual discipline and prospective science. In the United States, development of the foundation of fundamental knowledge for sound city planning has been subordinated to strengthening the superstructure of professional practice. Emulating the paper “Mathematical Problems” presented by David Hilbert at the turn of the century, twenty-three critical unresolved problems of urban planning analysis are identified and explained briefly. City planners are aware of most of these problems separately, but the importance of their resolution warrants collective statement. When these problems are resolved, urban planning will be established as a foremost field of knowledge deserving universal application.

This paper postulates that larger more complicated organisms cannot be comprehended completely. Some of their important internal characteristics and dynamics are indeterminate. Certain external conditions and occurrences vitally affecting them cannot be predicted or treated as random events. The internal functioning of complex organisms and their interaction with the external environment cannot therefore be formulated analytically with the completeness, precision, and reliability required for truly comprehensive planning and decision-making. Limitations of rational and collective action by people are also involved in what comprehensive planning can and cannot accomplish, and how it is best conducted.

This study analyses the failures of the zoning system in large cities in the USA. The ease with which waivers have been granted to developers in return for amenity provision has made nonsense of town planning. The long construction lead times of transport and public utility systems never allows them to catch up with contemporary densities. City councillors see no political advantage in concerning themselves with planning for the city as a whole. A change in attitude must bring about higher-level planning if over- or misguided densification is to be halted.