Modern City Planning

In its modern form, city planning is an ongoing process that concerns not only physical design but also social, economic, and political policy issues. City planning requires more than a narrow specialist who can develop and implement a physical plan. The basic city-planning document is a comprehensive plan that is adopted and maintained with regular revisions. The plan receives its day-to-day expression in zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations, and building and housing codes that establish standards of land use and quality of construction. The comprehensive plan served as a guide to making daily development decisions in terms of their long-range consequences.

Land is allocated and private activities are coordinated with public facilities by means of zoning ordinances and subdivision regulations. A zoning ordinance governs how the land may be used and the size, type, and number of structures that may be built on the land. Construction on previously undeveloped land is controlled by subdivision regulations and by site-plan review. Building and housing codes govern the quality and safety of new buildings, as well as subsequent maintenance.

Contemporary city planning also addresses many long-range social and economic issues, including economic development and redevelopment. Economic development plans involve job training and create jobs, establish new industry and business, help existing enterprises to flourish, rehabilitate what is salvageable, and redevelop what cannot be saved. Capital projects–such as road improvements, street lighting, public parking facilities, and purchase of land for open spaces–must be considered and prioritized. In declining areas, economic redevelopment is of prime concern. City planners must understand that regional, interregional, national, and international economic forces affect a city. Their plans must reflect the interests and priorities of the people and businesses of the city, and the programs that are implemented must help the city survive and maintain the quality of life that these groups desire.

Civil Rights are the freedoms that people may have as members of a community, particularly a nation. In most countries, law and custom guarantee civil rights.

Civil Service includes most civilian government employees who are appointed rather than elected.

Colonialism is a term that refers to the rule of a group of people by a foreign power.

Commonwealth, body of people in a politically organized community that is independent or semi-independent, and in which the government functions by the common consent of the people. The United States and its separate, semiautonomous states are commonwealths. In addition, the term is applied in a general sense to an association of persons having a common interest. It is also applied to Australia and the Bahamas and to the association of countries known as the Commonwealth of Nations.

Common Law is the body of rules found in the written records of judges' decisions. It is law made by courts, rather than by legislatures.

Communist Parties, political organizations designed to establish and maintain a Communist system, theoretically dominated by the working class and generally patterned on the party established in Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Most Communist parties have been totalitarian and monolithic in both spirit and practice (see Totalitarianism). In the 1980s more than one-fourth of the world's population lived under Communist rule. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, political and economic upheavals led to the collapse of numerous Communist regimes and severely weakened the power and influence of Communist parties throughout the world.