Urban Systems: A Policy Perspective

In some countries, enthusiastic beginnings in the planning and management of national settlement systems (or urban growth, or regional development) have run against some intractable problems. This paper points to dilemmas for research under the rationalistic paradigm that has come to dominate orthodox thinking about the policy planning process, discusses the inconvenient nature of the urban system's time constants, reviews some problems of policy implementation, and suggests shifted research directions. In the face of general ignorance about policy outcomes and public values, the policy directions that now seem appropriate are less ambitious than those of a few years ago.