7 Types Of Urban Planning Concepts Explained

Urban planning is the art and science of shaping the future of our cities and towns. It's a complex field that involves a wide range of disciplines—architecture, engineering, economics, sociology, public health, finance, and more— and considerations, all aimed at creating sustainable, equitable, and thriving communities.

Urban planning is typically used as part of a larger city plan, and should tie back to your city’s mission and vision statements.

In this guide, we'll go over the 7 key types and concepts of urban planning critical for developing sustainable and efficient cities.

An Introduction to Urban Planning

Urban planning touches on numerous city-life elements—new and pre-existing land, buildings, roads, communal spaces, transportation, economic development, infrastructure, and the environment, among others. 

We’ve broadly categorized these aspects into different conceptual areas below. These areas are commonly referred to as types of urban planning, but it’s important to understand that they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, a cohesive urban plan should include many or all of the below areas.

One more thing to note: Urban planning is more effective when you approach it with a strategic lens. That means setting clear goals, measuring progress, and strategically defining and executing projects. 

This is where strategy software like ClearPoint Strategy comes in handy—to ensure that all your projects align with strategy, and help you stay on top of timelines, milestones, and budgets. To be clear, our software supports the execution of all types of strategic planning, but in this article, we’ll call out some of its specific strengths as related to each of the urban planning concepts below.

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What Do Urban Planners Actually Do?

Urban planners are the architects of our urban landscapes. They wear many hats, tackling a wide range of responsibilities:

• Visionaries: They envision the future of cities, considering factors like population growth, economic development, and environmental sustainability.
• Designers: They design the physical layout of cities, from zoning and land use to transportation systems and public spaces.
• Policymakers: They develop and implement policies that guide urban development, ensuring it aligns with community goals and values.
• Problem Solvers: They address challenges like housing affordability, traffic congestion, and climate change resilience.
• Community Advocates: They engage with residents, businesses, and stakeholders to ensure that urban planning decisions reflect the needs and aspirations of the community.

Urban planners play a crucial role in shaping the future of urban areas by balancing the needs of the community with the sustainable use of resources.

7 Types Of Urban Planning Concepts Explained from a Strategic Lens

1. Strategic Urban Planning

Strategic Urban Planning focuses on setting high-level goals and determining desired areas of growth for a city or metropolitan area. The strategic plan’s goals may include easing transportation throughout the city, creating more community spaces, improving citizens’ quality of life, or encouraging people to visit or move to the city.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Strategic Urban Planning:

Your city likely has a variety of plans across different departments and within different areas (public health, infrastructure, capital improvement, etc.). It can be very difficult to see how all the pieces fit together, and to make sure everyone is working to achieve a unified vision.

ClearPoint was designed to help you see the big picture. You can organize your overall strategy according to themes, and easily view the objectives, initiatives, and measures associated with each (as shown below). You can also link departmental goals, measures, and projects directly to organizational goals and projects, so that everything forms a single, cohesive strategic plan. 

ClearPoint can then be used to track and report on the progress of your projects, making sure you bring your goals to fruition.

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2. Land-Use Planning

Land-Use Planning concerns legislation and policy, adopting planning instruments like governmental statutes, regulations, rules, codes, and policies to influence land use. These planning instruments deal with the type, location, and amount of land needed to carry out different functions of the city.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Land-Use Planning:

Open and transparent decision-making is a key component of land-use planning; ClearPoint’s robust reporting functionality supports information transparency.

You’ll likely need to share information with lots of different audiences. Once you determine the design and data points necessary for each audience, ClearPoint takes over, automatically generating those various reports in your preferred format—whether it’s Excel, PDF, PPT, or HTML. It also handles report distribution and shares reports on a specified schedule. 

You can elect to publish the data on your website (as shown below, for the city of Charlottesville’s public works department) or create reports to share via email.

Everyone will always have the information they need, whenever they need it.

3. Master Planning

Typically used for greenfield development projects, or building on undeveloped land. Urban planners must consider the required zoning and infrastructure to make the project possible, such as residential and commercial land, transportation considerations, road locations, etc.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Master Planning:

Developing new projects, collaborating with others, delivering on the municipality’s larger vision… ClearPoint makes it easier to carry out every aspect of master planning. Use it to:

• Evaluate and prioritize ideas.
• Tie projects to high-level strategic objectives.
• Create a detailed breakdown of the required tasks, building in milestones, due dates, and collaborators.
• Gather quantitative and qualitative data on progress.
• Visualize project performance in auto-generated reports.

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4. Urban Revitalization

Focuses on improving areas that are in a state of decline. The improvement tactics city leaders use for revitalization may include things like repairing roads, developing infrastructure, cleaning up pollution, and adding to parks and other public spaces.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Urban Revitalization:

Again, having that big-picture view is important here. To improve areas in a state of decline, it’s helpful to have a thorough understanding of factors that have contributed to that decline. ClearPoint’s ability to link measures and initiatives gives you greater, more visible insight into steps being taken to improve any given measure. 

So once you complete a project—for example, repairing the sidewalks in a certain area or cleaning up a public space—you can tell if the changes are having a direct impact on the use of those spaces.

ClearPoint’s measure dashboard, shown below, brings all your different measure charts together in one place, so you can see at a glance how things are changing from one reporting period to another.

5. Economic Development

Identifying areas of growth to foster greater financial prosperity within the city by enticing companies to build or move offices there. This, in turn, drives economic activity and boosts local businesses.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Economic Development:

To correctly pull all the necessary levers that support economic growth—some being more crucial than others—you need collaboration among departments. Rather than having data silos that limit collaboration, ClearPoint allows users to selectively share information internally across departments, so everyone can see and understand their department’s (and even their individual) role in it.

Having that open access makes it easier to identify areas of growth and coordinate activities. For instance, if you’re trying to attract more people to work in your city, you might consider joining forces with the transportation department to improve public transportation, or the infrastructure department to implement internet of things (IoT) technology. 

In ClearPoint you can view collaborating departments’ progress on goals, ascertain their capacity to take on additional projects, and understand how their strategy converges with yours.

The image below shows a portion of a departmental scorecard in ClearPoint with links to “parent” measures and initiatives.

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6. Environmental Planning

Emphasizes sustainability, addressing air pollution, noise pollution, wetlands, habitats of endangered species, flood zone susceptibility, and coastal zone erosion, along with other environmental factors.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Environmental Planning:

ClearPoint has the features you need to manage both your larger environmental program and the numerous projects entailed in accomplishing those larger objectives. You can:

• Prioritize projects according to organizational goals.
• Ensure environmental programs and projects are linked to the city’s overall strategy.
• Allocate resources effectively.
• Generate realistic project timelines and proper sequencing of projects.
• Track progress on hundreds of projects simultaneously.
• Evaluate the program’s real-time status automatically, based on the status of linked goals, KPIs, or projects.

Gantt charts, like the one below created in ClearPoint, are useful for mapping project timelines, start/end dates, and milestones.

7. Infrastructure Planning

Deals with the fundamental facilities and systems that serve a city and its people, including public works infrastructure, community infrastructure, and safety and transportation systems.

How ClearPoint Strategy supports Infrastructure Planning:

Like environmental planning, infrastructure planning covers a lot of ground. ClearPoint offers you a way to manage everything—all the plans, projects, objectives, measures, etc.—with a single tool. 

ClearPoint’s approach reduces the work involved because it uses a single data set for reporting and analysis; it also makes it easy to see the linkage between programs, projects, and organizational goals, and track progress on it all.

It also promotes consistency in your reporting—you can design multiple reports and detail pages using the same format, making it easier for you (and your audiences) to digest the information.

3 Urban Planning Real-Life Examples

Good planning takes a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort. As the following examples show, planning at the city, county, and state levels can have a positive, lasting impact on your community.

1. Raleigh, North Carolina aims to improve quality of life

Raleigh’s city planning department has a lofty goal: Create a city where the quality of life is second to none. This goal ties directly to the city’s overall strategic plan, making strategic urban planning a priority.

To achieve this goal and prepare for likely changes across the city, Raleigh leadership is planning a number of different tactics, including conducting studies to evaluate the impact of population growth. These studies inform future strategic planning, helping the city to prioritize initiatives and allocate resources appropriately.

Many of the key focus areas of the city’s strategic plan rely on urban planning, but there are three that stand out over the others:

• Growth & Natural Resources
• Safe, Vibrant & Healthy Community
• Transportation & Transit

The city planning department is a key player in the success of these focus areas and the initiatives that support them. Having a clear urban plan has allowed the city to make improvements and be able to spread the message that Raleigh is a “great place to live, work, and play.”

2. New York, New York elevates nature (and pedestrians)

New York’s High Line experiment transformed a 1930s elevated railroad into gardens that stretch a mile and a half. Instead of tearing down the tracks, city leadership gave it new life through careful urban planning efforts.

This experiment was so successful that it’s now a top visitor attraction—with popularity that’s been said to dwarf the famed Statue of Liberty. Its success has also inspired other cities to recreate a similar experience for their own citizens.

New York has included green space in all of its planning going forward, and there are many other examples of great outdoor spaces that are giving the city a feeling of openness in one of the most densely populated areas in the country. Waterfront parks, the Downtown Boathouse, and Fort Tryon Park are just a few of the many spaces available to enjoy the outdoors.

3. Eugene, Oregon goes green

Urban planning tends to be environmentally focused in Eugene, which was once named the fifth greenest city in America and the best city for urban farming. What makes the city so green?

For one, it boasts an innovative public power grid that draws 85% of its energy from renewables. In addition, the city is very accessible by bike and hybrid transport. Eugene also managed to meet the ambitious goal it had been working toward for a decade: it became carbon neutral in 2020.

This isn’t Eugene just being trendy. It was known as the Emerald City since before Earth Day was created, and part of its brand is to be green all year round. Thus, to live and execute on that strategy, it has put in place some ambitious goals and modeled its planning process around these goals.

Are you working within a municipality? This article on developing a municipal development plan includes several specific planning examples for municipalities.

See Winnebago County's transformation in our case study video

What Is the Difference Between Urban Design and Urban Planning?

Urban design and urban planning are closely related but distinct fields:

• Urban Planning: Focuses on the broader picture, including the overall development and growth of urban areas. It involves creating policies, setting goals, and developing plans for land use, infrastructure, and services.
• Urban Design: Deals with the specific details of design and aesthetics in urban areas. It involves creating attractive, functional spaces within the urban environment, including public spaces, streetscapes, and building layouts.

Think of urban planning as the "big picture" and urban design as the "details." Urban planners create the framework, while urban designers bring it to life.

Community Engagement in Urban Planning

Engaging the community in urban planning is essential for creating plans that reflect the needs and desires of the people who live there. Community involvement can take many forms, including public meetings, surveys, workshops, and collaborative planning sessions.

ClearPoint Strategy can enhance community engagement by providing a transparent platform for sharing information and gathering feedback. With ClearPoint, you can:

• Create and distribute public-facing dashboards to keep the community informed.
• Use reports to visualize progress and share updates.
• Collect and analyze feedback to ensure that community input is integrated into planning decisions.

ClearPoint empowers urban planners to build trust, transparency, and collaboration, leading to more effective and equitable urban planning outcomes.

Technology in Urban Planning

Technology is revolutionizing the field of urban planning, offering new tools and insights to help planners create smarter, more sustainable cities:

• Smart City Solutions: Sensors, data analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) enable real-time monitoring of urban systems, optimizing traffic flow, energy use, and resource management.
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS): GIS tools provide powerful spatial analysis capabilities, helping planners visualize data, identify patterns, and make informed decisions.
• 3D Modeling and Visualization: Immersive technologies allow planners to create virtual models of proposed developments, giving stakeholders a realistic preview of future projects.
• Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR): These technologies offer interactive ways for residents to experience proposed changes to their neighborhoods, fostering greater understanding and engagement.

These technologies enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of urban planning, making it possible to create more resilient and sustainable cities.

Urban Planning in Local Government

Local governments play a crucial role in urban planning by setting policies and implementing development plans. They are responsible for:

• Zoning and Land Use Regulations: Ensuring that development occurs in a way that is safe, sustainable, and consistent with community goals.
• Transportation Planning: Designing efficient transportation systems that connect people to jobs, schools, and other essential destinations.
• Housing Policy: Addressing issues of affordability and access to housing for all residents.
• Economic Development: Attracting businesses and investments to create jobs and strengthen the local economy.
• Environmental Protection: Safeguarding natural resources, reducing pollution, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

ClearPoint Strategy can support local governments by providing tools for:

• Strategic planning and goal setting.
• Performance tracking and reporting.
• Collaboration across departments and agencies.

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Urban Planning from an Administrative Lens

Urban planning from an administrative lens involves managing the complex processes and regulations that govern urban development. 

This includes:

• Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring that development projects comply with local, state, and federal regulations.
• Interagency Coordination: Collaborating with various government agencies to align planning efforts.
• Resource Allocation: Distributing resources efficiently to support development projects.

Effective urban planning requires a strategic mindset. It's not just about creating plans; it's about executing those plans successfully. This involves:

• Setting Clear Goals: Define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for urban development.
• Developing Actionable Strategies: Outline clear steps and initiatives to achieve those goals.
• Resource Allocation: Allocate budgets, personnel, and other resources to support the implementation of plans.
• Monitoring and Evaluation: Track progress, measure outcomes, and make adjustments as needed to ensure projects stay on track.

Bring Strategy Software To The Urban Planning Table

A well-developed, effective urban plan requires thorough research and input from numerous stakeholders, including citizens, landowners, and government staff.

Urban planners should think about their plans from the perspectives of all who will be impacted by their efforts. And since implementing the plan uses taxpayer dollars, the plan should be as practical and cost-effective as possible. This is where the power of software in city strategic planning.

ClearPoint strategy execution software can help your local government develop that plan and reach your urban planning goals. It can also provide the transparency your citizens are looking for, giving you a simple way to share your plans and desired outcomes. Want to see ClearPoint in action? Get in touch with our team and we’ll show you around!

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FAQ:

What is the goal of city planning?

The goal of city planning is to design and manage the physical, social, and economic development of urban areas to create sustainable, functional, and aesthetically pleasing communities. It aims to improve the quality of life for residents by ensuring efficient land use, infrastructure, public services, and environmental protection.

Why is urban planning necessary?

Urban planning is necessary to manage the growth and development of cities in a sustainable and organized manner. It helps address issues such as housing, transportation, public health, and environmental sustainability. Effective urban planning ensures that cities are well-equipped to handle population growth, economic changes, and environmental challenges while providing a high quality of life for residents.

What is the focus of urban planning?

The focus of urban planning includes:

- Land Use: Determining the best use of land for residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational purposes.
- Transportation: Designing efficient transportation systems to reduce congestion and improve accessibility.
- Housing: Ensuring adequate and affordable housing for all residents.
- Public Spaces: Creating and maintaining parks, green spaces, and public facilities.
- Sustainability: Promoting environmentally friendly practices and reducing the urban footprint.
- Community Development: Enhancing social cohesion and community engagement through inclusive planning.

What are urban planning principles?

Urban planning principles include:

- Sustainability: Promoting environmental stewardship and sustainable development.
- Equity: Ensuring fair access to resources and opportunities for all residents.
- Efficiency: Optimizing the use of resources, including land, infrastructure, and services.
- Resilience: Building communities that can withstand and recover from economic, social, and environmental shocks.
- Inclusivity: Engaging diverse stakeholders in the planning process to reflect the needs of all community members.
- Health and Well-being: Designing urban environments that promote physical and mental health.

What are urban planning theories?

Urban planning theories provide frameworks for understanding and guiding the development of cities. Key theories include:

- Rational Planning Theory: Focuses on systematic, data-driven decision-making processes.
- Incremental Planning Theory: Emphasizes small, gradual changes and adjustments over time.
- Advocacy Planning Theory: Highlights the importance of representing marginalized groups in the planning process.
- Communicative Planning Theory: Stresses the role of communication and collaboration among stakeholders.
- Sustainable Development Theory: Integrates economic, social, and environmental considerations to promote long-term sustainability.