What town planning is: its definitions, its scope and where the idea came from

What this chapter is for

Town planning is a public body deciding in advance how the land of a town will be used, so that it meets the needs that owners acting alone will not meet. This chapter follows that idea from the first British planning law of 1909 to the guidelines of the United Nations in 2015, and into three real towns, Letchworth, Islamabad and Karachi. By the end you will be able to define planning in your own words and in the words of its sources, draw the cycle by which a plan is made, and explain why a town without a plan runs short of schools, roads, open space and health. The chapter has four parts. It begins with what planning is, why a town left to its owners goes wrong and the words a planner uses, moves to how the definitions grew, how a plan is made and the tools it works through, then to what a planner plans, planning as an art, a science and a choice of values, three towns and who plans in Pakistan, and ends with the critics and where town planning stands now, before the last sections turn to the paper.

The syllabus begins with the definition of town planning, and every later chapter in this subject uses the words and ideas taught here. CE-2022 asked directly what problems a town faces if it has no planning, and how planning helps a city to grow.¹ Almost every other question on the paper assumes what this chapter teaches.

Before you start

The words

Town planning. The work of deciding in advance how the land of a town and the land around it will be used and built on. It is also called urban planning, city planning and, in Britain, town and country planning.

Urban. Of a town or city. Each country decides for itself what size of settlement counts as urban.

Land use. What a piece of land is used for, such as housing, shops, factories, roads, schools or open space.

Master plan. A plan that shows on a map how a town should look at a future date, usually twenty years ahead.

Amenity. Something that makes a place pleasant to live in, such as a park, a clean street or a quiet neighbourhood.

Externality. A cost or a benefit that one person’s action puts on others who did not agree to it, such as smoke from a factory settling on the houses beside it.

Survey. The careful collection of facts about a town before a plan is drawn, covering its land, people, buildings, traffic, services and economy.

Planning system. All the laws, offices, plans and people that together decide how land is used.

Stakeholder. Any person or group with something at stake in a decision, such as landowners, residents, builders and the government.

Subsidiarity. The rule that a decision should be taken at the lowest level of government that can take it well.

The places

Letchworth. A town in Hertfordshire, England, built from 1903 as the first garden city, a town planned in full before it was built.

Islamabad. The capital of Pakistan, planned as a whole by the firm of Constantinos Doxiadis and approved in 1960.

Karachi. The largest city of Pakistan, which has had five master plans and outgrew every one of them.

The story in plain words

1. People have always lived in settlements, and most settlements were planned in some way, by a ruler, a priest or a council.
2. In the nineteenth century factories made towns grow very fast, and they became crowded, dirty and deadly.
3. Each landowner built as much as the land would hold, and nobody kept space for schools, parks or wide roads.
4. Doctors and engineers answered first with clean water and drains.
5. Reformers then asked whether a whole town could be designed before it was built, and Letchworth was the result.
6. In 1909 Britain passed the first law that let a council plan land before it was built on.
7. Planners learned to survey a town before drawing a plan, and to treat planning as a cycle that never ends.
8. Planning spread across the world, often through colonial rule, and was often copied without being fitted to poor countries.
9. Critics said planning was slow, rigid and unfair to the poor, and the United Nations agreed that its old form needed reform.
10. Today planning is understood as a public decision process that must be backed by law, money and the people it serves.

1. Town planning is a public decision about land, taken in advance

Town planning is a decision, taken by a public body before the land is built on, about how the land of a town will be used. Its purpose is to meet needs that private owners, each acting alone, will not meet. A candidate who can explain each part of that sentence has understood the subject, and the rest of this section takes them in turn.

The decision is public because a body answerable to the people takes it, whether a municipal council, a development authority or a provincial government. A private developer also plans a housing scheme, but that is the plan of one owner for one plot, made for profit. Town planning stands above the separate plans of owners and fits them into a whole. The decision is taken in advance because a building, once it stands, is very hard to move. A road can be widened only by pulling down the houses along it, so the cheapest moment to leave space for a road is before anyone builds.

The decision is about land because land is the one thing every activity of a town needs. A school, a factory, a hospital, a bus station and a park all need a site, and a site used for one thing cannot be used for another. Planning is therefore the sharing out of a fixed and scarce resource among competing uses. This is why planners speak so much of land use, zoning and density, which are all ways of saying how much land goes to what.

Finally, planning exists because owners acting alone fall short. This is not a claim that owners are greedy. It is a claim about what one owner can see. A landowner sensibly asks how to make the most of one plot, and nobody in that position asks where the town’s school will go, or whether the drains of a thousand plots will join up. The United Nations puts the modern version of this idea in one sentence, defining urban and territorial planning as “a decision-making process aimed at realizing economic, social, cultural and environmental goals”.⁷

This idea has limits that matter as much as the idea. It does not say that every plan is good, since many plans have failed, and later sections show some that did. Nor does it say the market has no part. Most of any town is built by private owners, and the United Nations itself says the management of urban change “cannot be left only to the market or governments”.⁸ The idea says only that some public decision about land is unavoidable. Whether a town plans well or badly, openly or behind closed doors, is the real question, and the rest of this subject is about that question.

2. Why a town left to its owners goes wrong

The easiest way to see why planning exists is to watch a town grow without it. Imagine a field at the edge of a growing town. Its owner sells it to a builder, who covers it with as many houses as it will hold, because every extra house adds to the profit. The builder has no reason to leave a plot empty for a school or a park, and no reason to make the road wider than the houses need. When the families move in, the school, the park and the wide road are missing. Years later the town council must buy back scraps of land at the high prices the new houses have created, and squeeze the school into whatever is left.

This is not an invented story. Raymond Unwin, the architect who planned the first garden city, described exactly this in 1909. Unwin wrote that “the corporations and other governing bodies have looked on helplessly while estate after estate around their towns has been covered with buildings without any provision having been made for open spaces, school sites, or any other public needs.”² The owner’s aim, Unwin said, had been “to produce the maximum increase of value or of ground rent possible for himself by crowding upon the land as much building as it would hold”. The community then had to “purchase at these ruinous values such scraps of the land as may have been left”, so that “huge sums of public money have been wasted”.²

What Unwin described can be sorted into four harms, and an answer on the problems of an unplanned town should name all four. The first is missing public needs. Schools, parks, playgrounds, graveyards and sites for clinics are needed by everyone but profitable to no single owner, so the market alone does not supply them.

The second is harm between neighbours, which economists call an externality. A tannery or a brick kiln beside houses saves its owner money while the families next door pay with their health. The United Nations’ history of planning says that the first purpose of planning in the nineteenth century was “to combat the negative externalities of industrialization and urbanization”.⁸ Keeping factories away from homes, which planners call separating land uses, was one of the earliest tools for this.

The third is waste of public money. A road, a sewer or a water main laid before building is far cheaper than one forced through a built-up area later. When a town has to demolish houses to widen a road, or dig up streets to lay a drain that should have gone in first, it pays twice. Unwin’s “ruinous values” are this cost.

The fourth is ill health, and historically it came first. Planning grew from public health. The United Nations says that “planning and public health were linked, with ancestry in the English sanitary movement of the 1840s”, when engineers and doctors fought cholera by cleaning water supplies, building sewers and separating homes from factories.⁸ That is why the first planning law, discussed below, put “sanitary conditions” at the head of its aims.

A town that does not plan still makes decisions about its land, but it makes them by default, one plot at a time, in whatever way each owner finds profitable. The faster a town grows, the more of its future is fixed in this way before anyone has thought about it. The scale of growth now is very large. The United Nations reckons that in 2025 about 45 per cent of the world’s 8.2 billion people lived in cities, against 20 per cent in 1950, and that Pakistan is one of seven countries that together will add more than 500 million city dwellers by 2050.⁹ Each of those people will need a home, a road, water and a school, and a plan is how a town decides where they go before they arrive.

3. The words a planner uses, and what each means

A candidate who uses the words of the subject loosely loses marks, so four words need care before the definitions. They are town, urban, plan and planning.

A town is a settlement larger than a village, with a market, services and people who do not farm, and a city is a large and important town. There is no single size at which a village becomes a town or a town becomes a city, because each country draws its own line. To compare countries, the United Nations uses a single rule called the Degree of Urbanisation. Under it a city is a cluster of at least 50,000 people living at a density of at least 1,500 per square kilometre, and a town is a cluster of at least 5,000 people at a density of at least 300 per square kilometre.⁹ Pakistan’s census uses a different rule, explained in the chapter on urban and rural areas, so the two counts of Pakistan’s urban people differ.

Urban simply means of the town. The word matters because it marks off the kind of planning that deals with towns from other kinds, such as economic planning, which decides how a country invests its money, or health planning, which decides where hospitals and staff should go. UN-Habitat’s report of 2009 says that what sets town planning apart is “a concern with space (i.e. with ‘the where of things’”.⁸ Town planning is, at heart, the planning of where things go.

A plan can be three different things, and the paper uses all three. It can be a drawing, such as a master plan showing future land use. It can be a legal document, such as a zoning plan whose rules a court will enforce. It can be a programme of spending, such as a five-year plan of public works. A good plan for a town is usually all three at once, a map, a set of rules and a budget.

Planning is the activity of making and carrying out plans, and it is wider than any one plan. It includes the survey that comes before, the public consultation, the approval, the enforcement and the review that comes after. This is why the United Nations prefers to speak of a “planning system” and not of “the planner”, saying planning “is not only undertaken by professional urban and regional planners”.⁸ In Britain the work is called town and country planning, because it covers the countryside too, and some writers say physical planning, which stresses buildings and land, or spatial planning, which stresses space and place. These are not separate subjects. This chapter uses town planning and urban planning for the whole.

4. How the definitions of planning grew

Definitions of town planning have changed as the work itself has changed, and a candidate who can show that change scores better than one who repeats a single sentence. The definitions below run from a British law of 1909 to the United Nations in 2015, and each one added something the last had missed.

The first statute anywhere in Britain on town planning was the Housing, Town Planning, etc. Act 1909, which received royal assent on 3 December 1909.³ Its section 54 said a town planning scheme could be made for land “in course of development or appears likely to be used for building purposes, with the general object of securing proper sanitary conditions, amenity, and convenience in connexion with the laying out and use of the land, and of any neighbouring lands.”³ This is not a definition of a profession. It is the purpose the law gave to a plan. It names three aims, health, pleasantness and convenience. It covers new land about to be built on, not the old town. Its mention of “neighbouring lands” shows that lawmakers already understood that what happens on one plot affects the next.

Raymond Unwin’s book of the same year gave planning its first idea of itself as a craft. Its subtitle was An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs, and Unwin wrote of “the art of town planning”.² For Unwin the planner was a designer who gave a town form and beauty as well as health, and the model was the carefully drawn suburb and the garden city.

Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist who became a town planner, gave planning its second idea, that of a science of observation. In Cities in Evolution in 1915 Geddes argued that a planner must understand a town before changing it. “To mitigate its evils,” Geddes wrote, a town “needs diagnosis before treatment”, and Geddes complained that “the natural order, that of town survey before town planning, is being reversed”.⁶ The comparison with medicine is exact. A doctor examines a patient before prescribing, and a planner surveys a town before drawing a plan. The civic survey, the first stage of every plan today, comes from Geddes.

Patrick Abercrombie, the planner who later drew the Greater London Plan of 1944, asked what turns a set of buildings into a plan. The answer, in Abercrombie’s book Town and Country Planning of 1933, was relationship. “The touchstone of what constitutes a planning scheme is this matter of relationship, the accommodation of several units to make a complete but harmonious whole,” Abercrombie wrote. A row of fine buildings that each ignore the others is not a plan, and nor is a large mass of building thrown together, which Abercrombie called “a mere mass or muddle”. The short version is the one to remember: “Planning is a conscious exercise of the powers of combination and design.”⁵ For a student the point is that planning is about how the pieces of a town fit together. A beautiful market that blocks the only road to the hospital has been designed, but it has not been planned.

Lewis Keeble, a British planner and teacher, wrote the definition that textbooks have quoted ever since. Keeble’s book Principles and Practice of Town and Country Planning first appeared in 1952, and the words quoted here are from its second edition of 1959, which Keeble rewrote completely. Keeble admitted that the subject “is not an easy subject to define”, and then offered this: town and country planning “might be described as the art and science of ordering the use of land and the character and siting of buildings and communication routes so as to secure the maximum practicable degree of economy, convenience and beauty.”⁴ Take it one piece at a time. “Art and science” joins Unwin’s designer to Geddes’s surveyor. The planner orders three things: how land is used, what buildings are like and where they stand, and the routes that join them. The aims are three as well, economy, convenience and beauty, so a plan should save money and effort, make daily life easier and make the town good to look at. The word “practicable” is the honest part. It admits that money, law and politics limit what any plan can do, so a planner aims for the most that can actually be achieved, not for a perfect town.

Keeble set this definition beside a shorter one by the planner B. J. Collins, “the organising of building and land use in pursuance of an express scheme of urban or rural evolution”, and found Collins’s too narrow, because a plan sometimes has to be made before anyone has agreed what the town should become.⁴ Keeble also noted that “Nearly all development of land is in fact in some sense planned”. The trouble, in Keeble’s view, was that the planning is usually done over too small an area and in too little detail.⁴ That remark is worth carrying into an examination hall, because it answers the student who says Pakistan’s towns are unplanned. They are planned, plot by plot, by each owner. What is missing is a plan for the whole.

By the twenty-first century planning had grown far beyond drawing and surveying. In 2015 the Governing Council of UN-Habitat approved the International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning, in its Resolution 25/6 of 23 April 2015.⁷ They define planning as “a decision-making process aimed at realizing economic, social, cultural and environmental goals through the development of spatial visions, strategies and plans and the application of a set of policy principles, tools, institutional and participatory mechanisms and regulatory procedures.”⁷ This definition calls planning a process and not a drawing. It names four kinds of goals where the law of 1909 named three. It lists the tools, and among them are participatory mechanisms, which means that the public takes part.

UN-Habitat’s report of 2009 described the same change in its own words. It noted that “earlier views defined urban planning as physical design, enforced through land-use control and centred in the state”, and that planning is now seen as “a self-conscious collective (societal) effort to imagine or re-imagine a town, city, urban region or wider territory” and to turn that vision into priorities for investment, conservation, new settlement, infrastructure and land regulation.⁸

The definitions stress different things, yet they agree on a core, and that core is what a candidate should write first. Planning looks ahead. It deals with land and how land is used. It serves a public purpose, whether that is health, beauty or the four goals of the United Nations. It also moves a decision about land from the single owner to a body that answers to the public. Write a definition in your own words that holds these points, then support it with Keeble’s sentence and one other, and the examiner will see that you know the subject’s history as well as its meaning.

5. How a plan is made, from the survey to the review

A plan is not drawn in one sitting. It is the product of a sequence of stages, and planners usually draw that sequence as a loop, because the last stage feeds back into the first. Knowing the stages lets a candidate explain both how planning works and why plans fail, since most failures come from a skipped stage.

The first stage is the survey, which is Geddes’s rule. The planner gathers facts about the town’s land and who owns it, its population and how fast it grows, its buildings and their condition, its traffic, its water, drains and power, its economy and its natural setting, such as the slope of the land and the areas that flood. Pakistan’s law recognises this as planning work, listing “physical and socio-economic surveys” among the tasks of a registered town planner.¹²

The second stage is analysis and diagnosis. The facts are turned into an understanding of the town’s problems and their causes. A survey may show that a district floods every monsoon; the diagnosis explains that houses have been built across a natural drainage channel. The third stage sets goals and objectives. A goal is broad, such as a healthy town, while an objective is measurable, such as a sewer connection for every house within fifteen years.

The fourth stage prepares alternatives. A good planner draws several possible plans, for example one that lets the town spread outwards and one that builds more densely inside its present limits. The fifth stage evaluates the alternatives against the objectives and their costs, and a choice is made. This is the point at which the public and its representatives should take part, because the choice involves values as well as facts.

The sixth stage is adoption. The chosen plan goes through a legal procedure of public notice, objections and approval, which gives it force. The first planning law already worked this way, requiring a scheme to be approved by the Local Government Board after notice and objections.³ The seventh stage is implementation, in which roads and drains are built, zoning rules are enforced and building permits are granted or refused. The eighth stage is monitoring and review. The planner watches whether the town is growing as the plan expected, and when it is not, the cycle begins again with a fresh survey.

The cycle explains why planning is never finished. A town changes every year, so a plan made once and left alone falls out of date, and the review stage is what keeps it alive. It also explains a common way plans fail. A plan drawn at a desk without a survey rests on guesses about the town. A plan never adopted in law is only advice, and owners can ignore it. A plan adopted but never funded is only a drawing. A plan carried out but never reviewed slowly drifts away from the town it was meant to guide. The United Nations names the three supports a plan needs in order to work, which are “an enforceable and transparent legal framework”, “sound and flexible urban planning and design” and “a financial plan for affordability and cost-effectiveness”.⁷ Each of the three answers one of these failures.

The chapter on how a plan is made teaches the kinds of plan in full, from the master plan and the structure plan to the strategic spatial plan, and sets out UN-Habitat’s own version of the process.

6. The tools through which a plan works

A plan on paper changes nothing until it is turned into action, and planners have a small set of tools for doing that. Knowing them explains how the cycle’s stage of implementation actually works, and why some plans bite while others are ignored. UN-Habitat’s report describes the older view of planning as “physical design, enforced through land-use control and centred in the state”, and land-use control is still the backbone of the toolkit, though the modern guidelines add tools of finance and participation beside it.⁸⁷

The first tool is the land use plan and its zoning rules. The plan marks which land is for housing, commerce, industry, open space and public buildings, and the zoning rules attached to it say what may be built in each zone, how tall, how dense and how far back from the road. Because the rules have the force of law, an owner who builds against them can be refused a permit, fined or made to pull the building down. The second tool is building and development control, the day-to-day work of checking each application against the plan and the rules, granting permits and inspecting what is built. A plan with no development control is a wish, because nothing stops owners from building as they please.

The third tool is public works. The roads, water mains, sewers, schools and parks that a public body builds are the strongest signal a plan can give, since private building follows the road and the water pipe. A town that lays a trunk road and a sewer into a new district has decided where growth will go far more firmly than any coloured map. The fourth tool is land acquisition and land assembly, the power to buy or compulsorily acquire land for public use, or to pool many small plots, replan them and return smaller serviced plots to their owners. Islamabad’s planners had this power from the start, which is one reason the plan could be carried out.¹⁴

The fifth tool is finance, the budget that pays for public works and the charges and taxes that recover part of the rise in land value a plan creates. The UN guidelines treat a financial plan as one of the three supports without which a plan fails.⁷ The last tool is participation, the hearings, consultations and committees through which the people affected by a plan shape it and come to accept it. A plan that residents helped to make is far easier to enforce than one imposed on them, which is why the guidelines list “participatory mechanisms” in their very definition of planning.⁷ The later chapters on land use classification, zoning, building control and participation teach each tool in full.

7. What a planner plans, from the region to the street

Planning works at more than one scale, and a candidate should be able to name them and give an example of each. The UN guidelines speak of “the multiscale continuum of spatial planning” and describe five levels.⁷ Each level decides different things, and each sets the frame for the level below it.

At the supranational and transboundary level, plans cross national borders. The guidelines say regional strategies at this level can deal with “global issues such as climate change and energy efficiency” and “improve the sustainable management of shared natural resources”.⁷ A plan for a river basin shared by several countries belongs here.

At the national level, a country decides where its main towns, ports, power plants and highways will go. The guidelines say national plans can “support, structure and balance the system of towns and cities”.⁷ Pakistan’s Five Year Plans and its national transport corridors belong to this level.

At the city-region and metropolitan level, planning covers a large city and the towns and villages that depend on it. Subnational regional plans, in the guidelines’ words, “could foster economic development by promoting regional economies of scale and agglomeration”.⁷ A regional plan for the Lahore division belongs here.

At the city and municipal level, planning decides the land use of one town, its main roads, its zones and its large public facilities. This is the level of the master plan and the zoning plan, which the papers ask about most often.

At the neighbourhood level, planning decides the layout of streets, the size of plots, the place of the local park, school, mosque and shops. The guidelines say plans at this scale “could improve urban quality, social cohesion and inclusion”.⁷

The five levels are linked like boxes inside boxes. A national decision to build a new port shapes the plan of the port city, and the city’s plan shapes the layout of each neighbourhood near the docks. The guidelines use the word subsidiarity for the rule that each decision should be taken at the lowest level able to take it well.⁷ The width of a lane belongs to the neighbourhood, while the route of a motorway between two cities belongs to the province or the nation. A plan that tries to decide neighbourhood details from the capital is slow and blind to local life, and a plan that leaves a regional road to each village never gets the road built.

The guidelines add a warning that applies at every scale. “Even plans that are not implemented have an impact on the real world, for instance by becoming obstacles to sustainable change.”⁷ An unfunded master plan can freeze land for years, raise the price of plots marked for future roads and block better schemes, so a plan left on the shelf still does harm.

8. Planning as an art, a science and a choice of values

Candidates are often asked whether planning is an art or a science. The best answer is that it is both, and also a third thing that neither word covers.

Planning is an art because it gives a town form. Unwin’s book is about “the art of designing cities and suburbs”, and much of it deals with the shape of streets, the grouping of buildings round a square and the views a street opens or closes.² A planner who lays out a neighbourhood decides how it will feel to walk through, and that is a design judgment no survey can make for the planner. The chapter on urban design takes this side of planning further.

Planning is a science because it rests on method. Geddes’s rule of survey before plan is a scientific rule, since it asks the planner to observe, record and analyse before acting.⁶ Modern planners count populations and forecast their growth, measure traffic, map land use from satellite images and test the cost of alternatives. These are the habits of a scientist, and the chapters on GIS and statistics teach the tools.

Planning is also a choice of values, and this is the point the United Nations makes most strongly. Its report of 2009 says plainly that “planning is not, therefore, a neutral technical exercise: it is shaped by values that must be made explicit, and planning itself is fundamentally concerned with making ethical judgements.”⁸ A plan decides who gets which land, whose houses stand in the path of a new road, and whether a green belt is kept for the city or sold for housing. A survey can say what will happen if a road goes through one district rather than another. It cannot say which district ought to bear the cost.

This gives a three-part answer that a candidate can write in three sentences. Planning uses the methods of a science to show the facts and the likely results of each choice. It uses the skill of an art to give the chosen plan a good form. It rests on a choice of values that belongs to the public and its elected representatives. The last point also answers a question the paper has asked about the planner as a “technocrat”, which means an expert who decides on grounds of skill.¹ The planner leads the experts and supplies the evidence and the design, but the decision on values rests with the people’s representatives.

9. Three towns that show what planning does

Definitions come alive in real places. Three towns, one in England and two in Pakistan, show planning at its most complete, planning at the scale of a national capital, and what happens when a city outgrows every plan made for it.

Ebenezer Howard, a London clerk, argued in 1898 that people should not have to choose between crowded cities and empty countryside, and that a new kind of town could join the advantages of both. Unwin records what followed. Supporters formed “a strong Garden City Association”, and “in the year 1903 an estate was purchased of about 3,800 acres at Letchworth in Hertfordshire, by the First Garden City Company”.² Unwin and Barry Parker drew the plan. Homes, factories, shops and open land were placed before a single house went up, a belt of farmland was kept round the town, and the land stayed in the company’s hands so that its rising value could serve the town. Letchworth showed that a whole town could be designed in advance, and its ideas of the green belt and the planned new town spread across the world. The chapter on garden cities and new towns tells its story in full.

Pakistan’s own best example of comprehensive planning is its capital. In 1959 the government gave the Greek firm Doxiadis Associates the task of planning a new capital near Rawalpindi, and the federal cabinet approved the master plan on 26 October 1960.¹³ The same year the Capital Development Authority Ordinance created an authority to plan, build and regulate the city, with power to acquire land, and required it to “act on sound principles of development, town planning and housing”.¹⁴ The plan divided the city into square sectors of two kilometres by two, each designed as a community with its own centre, and set them along a grid that could grow in one direction over time.¹³ Islamabad shows all three supports of a plan in place at the start, a law, a design and the money of the state. It also shows, as the chapter on Islamabad explains, how hard it is to keep a plan intact for sixty years as the city grows beyond it.

Karachi shows the opposite result. Between 1951 and 2006 its planners proposed five master plans, the plan of 1952, the Greater Karachi Resettlement Plan of 1958, the Master Plan for 1974 to 1985, the Karachi Development Plan 2000 and the Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020. The last two are named for the year each looked ahead to, not the year it was made.¹⁵

The plan of 1952 expected 3 million people by 2000 and was never carried out. The Resettlement Plan of 1958, also by Doxiadis, moved refugees and squatters to new satellite towns at Landhi-Korangi and New Karachi, far from jobs, and it was abandoned by 1964.¹⁶ Each later plan was made after long delay, for a city that had already grown past it, and a Master Plan Authority notified in February 2020 was, in a 2025 account, still waiting for cabinet approval.¹⁶ Meanwhile Karachi has become one of the world’s great cities, which the United Nations expects to enter the world’s ten largest by 2030, with a density of about 25,000 people per square kilometre in 2025.⁹

Set side by side, the three towns show what planning needs. Letchworth and Islamabad had a single body in charge of the land, a design made before building and money to carry it out. Karachi’s plans lacked one or more of these. Its land was held by many agencies that owed the plan nothing, its plans often had no legal force, and much of its growth was housed by an informal market that no plan foresaw. The lesson is not that Karachi should have had a better drawing. It is that a plan works only when law, money and the people who build the city stand behind it.

10. Who plans a town in Pakistan

The Constitution of Pakistan does not mention town planning by name, and that silence tells a reader where the power lies. Three provisions decide it.

The first is a duty. Article 38 sets out the state’s principles of policy for “promotion of social and economic well-being of the people”, and its clause (d) asks the state to “provide basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, housing, education and medical relief” for citizens unable to earn their livelihood.¹¹ A principle of policy cannot be enforced in a court, but it states what the state aims at, and housing is named.

The second decides who makes the law. Article 142 gives Parliament exclusive power over matters in the Federal Legislative List and gives each Provincial Assembly power over “any matter not enumerated in the Federal Legislative List”.¹¹ The Federal List names “national planning and national economic coordination”, but it does not name town or land use planning.¹¹ On a plain reading of the text, therefore, the law that governs how towns are planned is made by the provinces. This is why the planning laws of Pakistan are provincial laws, such as the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa acts that the chapter on planning laws and institutions describes.

The third decides who carries the work out. Article 140A says each province “shall, by law, establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local governments.”¹¹ The planning of a town is therefore, in principle, the task of its elected local government, working under provincial law. In practice the provinces have also set up development authorities, such as those of Lahore and Karachi, which plan and build alongside the local councils, and the overlap between the two is one of the reasons Pakistani plans are hard to carry out.

So the structure has three tiers. The federation plans nationally through its Five Year Plans and national projects. The provinces make the planning law and set up the authorities. Local governments and development authorities make and enforce the plan for each town. Every later chapter on Pakistan fills in the names, dates and powers.

11. The case against planning, from its critics

Planning has always had critics, and a candidate who leaves them out writes a pamphlet, not an answer. The strongest criticisms come from three directions, and the most damaging of them come from the United Nations itself.

The first criticism holds that planning is an unnecessary interference with the market. UN-Habitat’s report of 2009 records that at some times in the last century planning has been seen as able “to solve many of the major problems of urban areas”, while at other times it has been viewed as “unnecessary and unwanted government interference in market forces, with the latter able to address urban problems far more effectively than governments.”⁸ On this view prices tell builders what people want, and a plan made by officials who do not risk their own money will build the wrong things in the wrong places.

The second criticism is sharper and closer to Pakistan’s experience. It says that planning, as practised in many poor countries, has made poverty worse. The same report puts it in these words. “By setting unrealistic standards of land and urban development, and by encouraging inappropriate modernist urban forms, planning is promoting urban poverty and exclusion.”⁸ The mechanism is simple. If a plan says every plot must be large and every street wide, most families cannot afford a legal plot, so they build outside the law and the plan has made them illegal. The report’s verdict on the old master plan is that, being “based on spatial interventions that assume a far higher level of social affluence than is the case in most developing countries, it fails to accommodate the way of life of the majority of inhabitants in rapidly growing, and largely poor and informal cities”.⁸

The third criticism is that plans which are never carried out do real harm. The UN guidelines themselves say so. “Even plans that are not implemented have an impact on the real world, for instance by becoming obstacles to sustainable change.”⁷ Karachi’s history gives the example, since its plans froze land, raised hopes and then lapsed while the city grew in other ways.

These criticisms are serious, but they strike hardest at one form of planning, the rigid master plan imported from rich countries and imposed without money, law or consent. They are not arguments against any public decision about land. The United Nations draws exactly this conclusion, saying that “a main premise of this Global Report is not whether there should be urban planning, but rather what form it should take.”⁸ The answer to the market critic is Unwin’s evidence, since if owners alone supplied schools, parks and drains, the towns of 1909 would not have needed a law. The answer to the critic who speaks for the poor is a plan with realistic standards, made with the people it affects, that upgrades informal areas instead of outlawing them. The answer to the critic of unexecuted plans is a plan backed by law and a budget, and reviewed as the town changes.

12. Where town planning stands now

Planning today is shaped by three international documents and by the sheer scale of urban growth, and in Pakistan by laws that are only now catching up with that growth.

The International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning of 2015 are the profession’s current statement of what good planning is. They were written to be “a universally applicable reference framework to guide urban policy reforms” and call for cities that are “more compact, socially inclusive, better integrated and connected” and “resilient to climate change”.⁷ They give planning an economic role too, as “a powerful instrument for reshaping the forms and functions of cities and regions in order to generate endogenous economic growth, prosperity and employment, while addressing the needs of the most vulnerable, marginalized or underserved groups”.⁷

The Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 name planning directly. Goal 11 asks countries to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, and its Target 11.3 reads “by 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries”.¹⁰ Its two indicators measure whether land is being used up faster than the population grows, and whether citizens take part in planning “regularly and democratically”.¹⁰ The second indicator shows how far thinking has moved since 1909, when the public’s only part in a scheme was to lodge an objection.

UN-Habitat’s report of 2009, Planning Sustainable Cities, set the tone of the present debate with a blunt finding, that “in many parts of the world planning systems have changed very little and are now frequent contributors to urban problems rather than functioning as tools for human and environmental improvement.”⁸ It called for strategic plans that pick a few priorities instead of trying to fix everything, for participation, and for plans fitted to informal and fast-growing cities.

In Pakistan the pressure is unusually high. The United Nations counts Pakistan among the seven countries that will add most to the world’s city population by 2050, and expects Karachi to join the ten largest cities in the world by 2030.⁹ The papers reflect this. CE-2024 asked about the problems in preparing and carrying out the master plans that local authorities have recently commissioned, and CE-2025 asked about the new laws on land use and building control that the provinces have passed.¹ The shift visible in those questions, from drawing master plans to enforcing them through law and institutions, is the shift the United Nations has asked for.

13. What students confuse about town planning

Several confusions cost marks again and again, and each has a short correction.

Town planning and architecture are not the same. An architect designs a building on a given plot, while a town planner decides what the plot is for, how big it is, how it is reached and what stands around it. The two work together, and urban design sits between them, shaping the streets and spaces that buildings face. The chapter on planning and other professions draws the line in full.

A master plan is not the whole of planning. A master plan is one product of planning, a map of the town’s intended future. Planning also includes the survey, the law, the zoning, the budget, the enforcement and the review. A town can have a master plan and still not be planned, as Karachi shows, because the plan was never adopted, funded or enforced.

Planning and zoning are not the same. Zoning is one tool of planning, which divides land into zones and fixes what may be built in each. Planning decides what the zones should be and why. The chapter on zoning teaches the tool.

Urban and city are not the same. Every city is urban, but not every urban place is a city. A small town is urban without being a city. The UN’s Degree of Urbanisation draws the line at 50,000 people for a city and 5,000 for a town.⁹

Planning is not only for new towns. Letchworth and Islamabad are the famous examples, but most planning is the slow work of guiding the growth, renewal and repair of existing towns. The upgrading of an informal settlement, the widening of a road and the protection of a historic quarter are all planning.

Planning is not neutral. Students often write that planning is a technical matter best left to experts. The United Nations says the opposite, that planning “is not, therefore, a neutral technical exercise”.⁸ An answer that ignores who gains and who loses from a plan has missed half the subject.

14. What the examiners have asked

CE-2022, Question 3, is the one question that asks for the nature of planning directly.¹

“Planning is the backbone of development activities. It points out a precise way to reach a pre-determined goal within a pre-determined period of time with the means that are available with a planner and under the prevailing circumstances. Based on the information, what are the problems faced if there is no planning for towns and how it helps a city to grow? Explain.”

It sets three tasks. The first is to say what planning is, starting from the question’s own description. The second is to name the problems of a town with no planning, and the third is to explain how planning helps a city grow. An answer that gives only a definition has answered a third of the question.

CE-2026, Question 4, asked about land use planning theories and their “three main objectives; Health, Beauty and Convenience of Town Planning”.¹ A candidate who knows the 1909 Act’s “sanitary conditions, amenity, and convenience” starts that answer with a source, and the chapters on goals and on planning theories complete it.³ CE-2016, Question 2, asked about the town planner as a “technocrat” leading a team of experts, which belongs mainly to the chapter on the multi-disciplinary approach but needs this chapter’s definitions to begin.¹

15. Facts to take into the examination hall

• The first law. The Housing, Town Planning, etc. Act 1909 of the United Kingdom, royal assent 3 December 1909. Section 54 gives a scheme the object of “proper sanitary conditions, amenity, and convenience”.³
• Keeble. Town and country planning is “the art and science of ordering the use of land and the character and siting of buildings and communication routes so as to secure the maximum practicable degree of economy, convenience and beauty”. Lewis Keeble, Principles and Practice of Town and Country Planning, second edition, 1959; the book first appeared in 1952.⁴
• Abercrombie. “Planning is a conscious exercise of the powers of combination and design.” Town and Country Planning, 1933.⁵
• Unwin. Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs, 1909, on “the art of town planning” and owners “crowding upon the land as much building as it would hold”.²
• Letchworth. About 3,800 acres bought in 1903 by the First Garden City Company in Hertfordshire.²
• Geddes. Cities in Evolution, 1915. “Diagnosis before treatment.” Town survey before town planning.⁶
• The UN definition. “A decision-making process aimed at realizing economic, social, cultural and environmental goals”, in the International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning, UN-Habitat Resolution 25/6 of 23 April 2015.⁷
• Three supports of a plan. An enforceable legal framework, sound and flexible design, and a financial plan.⁷
• Five scales. Supranational and transboundary, national, city-region and metropolitan, city and municipal, neighbourhood.⁷
• Not neutral. “Planning is not, therefore, a neutral technical exercise” (UN-Habitat, 2009).⁸
• Origin in health. Planning and public health “linked, with ancestry in the English sanitary movement of the 1840s”.⁸
• Islamabad. Planned by Doxiadis Associates from 1959, master plan approved by the federal cabinet on 26 October 1960, Capital Development Authority Ordinance 1960.¹³¹⁴
• Karachi’s plans. Five, proposed between 1951 and 2006, from the plan of 1952 to the Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020, none carried out as drawn.¹⁵
• Cities in 2025. About 45 per cent of 8.2 billion people live in cities. Karachi expected in the world’s top ten by 2030, density about 25,000 per square kilometre.⁹
• SDG Target 11.3. Inclusive and sustainable urbanization and participatory, integrated and sustainable planning, by 2030.¹⁰
• The Constitution. Article 38(d) on housing, Article 142 on provincial law-making, Article 140A on local government.¹¹

16. What loses marks on this subject

1. A one-line definition and nothing more. CE-2022 asked for the problems of no planning and how planning helps. A definition alone answers a third of it.¹
2. One definition with no source. Give two or three, from different dates, and name each source.
3. Planning treated as drawing only. The UN calls it a “decision-making process” with a legal, financial and political side.⁷
4. Planning treated as purely technical. Leave out values and politics and the answer reads as though planning had no critics.⁸
5. Praise with no criticism. Name the critics and answer them, or the examiner reads a pamphlet.
6. No Pakistan. Use Islamabad, Karachi or the constitutional division of power.
7. Attacking an institution instead of a policy. Say a plan lacked law or funding and give the remedy. Do not call a development authority useless.
8. Dates from memory. Use the dates in this chapter, such as 3 December 1909, 26 October 1960 and 23 April 2015.

17. A worked answer plan

The question

CE-2022, Question 3. “Planning is the backbone of development activities. It points out a precise way to reach a pre-determined goal within a pre-determined period of time with the means that are available with a planner and under the prevailing circumstances. Based on the information, what are the problems faced if there is no planning for towns and how it helps a city to grow? Explain.”¹

The tasks

1. Say what planning is, on the question’s own description.
2. Name the problems faced by a town with no planning.
3. Explain how planning helps a city grow.

The headings

• What town planning is, and why it is the backbone of development
• Problems of an unplanned town: missing public needs
• Problems of an unplanned town: harm between neighbours and waste of public money
• Problems of an unplanned town: ill health
• How planning helps a city grow: the cycle of survey, plan, law and review
• Two Pakistani cases: planned Islamabad and unplanned growth in Karachi
• Where planning has failed, and what makes it work
• Conclusion

A sketch

Draw Figure 1 of this chapter, the same field laid out by its owner and laid out to a plan, with the missing school, park and wide road labelled. Then draw the planning cycle of Figure 2. The two sketches carry the problems and the remedy at a glance.

A model introduction

Town planning is a public decision, taken in advance, about how the land of a town will be used. The United Nations defines it as “a decision-making process aimed at realizing economic, social, cultural and environmental goals”. A town with no plan is not a town with no decisions. It is a town whose decisions are made plot by plot by each owner for the owner’s own profit. Raymond Unwin showed in 1909 what follows, with estates “covered with buildings without any provision having been made for open spaces, school sites, or any other public needs”. This answer sets out those problems and then shows how a plan, backed by law and money, lets a city grow in step with its people, with Islamabad and Karachi as the Pakistani cases.

The support, under each heading

The first heading takes the UN definition and the four shared points of the definitions.⁷ The next three take the four harms of an unplanned town, with Unwin’s account and the sanitary movement as evidence.²⁸ The fifth takes the planning cycle and the three supports of a plan.⁷ The sixth contrasts Islamabad’s plan, law and authority with Karachi’s five unexecuted plans.¹³¹⁶ The seventh takes the UN’s criticism of rigid master plans and its call for strategic, participatory planning.⁸

A model conclusion

A town with no plan is still shaped by decisions, but they are made one plot at a time and the town as a whole pays for them. Planning gives the town a way to decide for itself, in advance and in the open. Islamabad shows what planning can achieve when law, design and money stand behind it, and Karachi shows what happens when they do not. Pakistan’s cities will grow faster than ever over the next twenty-five years, and a strategic plan, made with their people and backed by law and a budget, is how that growth can be housed, moved and kept healthy.

What to remember from this chapter

• Town planning is a public decision, taken in advance, about how land is used, to meet needs owners acting alone will not meet.
• An unplanned town suffers four harms, missing public needs, harm between neighbours, waste of public money and ill health.
• The first planning law, of 1909, aimed at “sanitary conditions, amenity, and convenience”. Unwin called planning an art, Geddes demanded a survey first, and the UN calls it a decision-making process.
• A plan is made in a cycle of survey, diagnosis, goals, alternatives, evaluation, adoption, implementation and review.
• Planning works at five scales, from the supranational to the neighbourhood, linked by the rule of subsidiarity.
• Planning is an art, a science and a choice of values, and it is never neutral.
• Letchworth and Islamabad show planning with law, design and money behind it, and Karachi shows what happens without them.
• Under the Constitution, provinces make planning law and local governments carry it out.
• The critics say planning interferes with the market, harms the poor and leaves unexecuted plans behind. The answer is a strategic, participatory plan backed by law and money.

Check yourself

Try each question from memory, in your own words, before you open the answer.

1. Explain in your own words why town planning is called a public decision about land, taken in advance. What does each of those parts add? (The section on town planning as a public decision about land, taken in advance)

2. A district officer tells you a town grows well enough if each owner builds as the owner likes. Name the four harms you would point to, with an example of each, and say why they happen. (The section on why a town left to its owners goes wrong)

3. Explain the three things the word plan can mean, and why a town can have a master plan and still not be planned. (The section on the words a planner uses)

4. In your own words, how did the idea of planning change from the Act of 1909, to Geddes in 1915, to the UN guidelines of 2015? Say what each added. (The section on how the definitions of planning grew)

5. Take Keeble’s definition apart. What three things does a planner order, what three aims does the plan serve, and why does the word practicable matter? (The section on how the definitions of planning grew)

6. Draw the planning cycle from memory with its eight stages. Then say what goes wrong when the survey, the adoption or the review is skipped. (The section on how a plan is made, from the survey to the review)

7. A master plan has been drawn for a town. Explain the tools that turn it into action, and why a road and a sewer can decide growth more firmly than the coloured map. (The section on the tools through which a plan works)

8. Name the five scales of planning with an example of each, and explain the rule of subsidiarity. (The section on what a planner plans, from the region to the street)

9. A classmate writes that planning is a technical matter best left to experts. Answer in three sentences, then say where the classmate goes wrong. (The section on planning as an art, a science and a choice of values)

10. Compare Letchworth, Islamabad and Karachi. What did the first two have that Karachi’s plans lacked? (The section on three towns that show what planning does)

11. Explain which level of government in Pakistan makes the law for planning towns, which carries it out, and which articles of the Constitution decide this. (The section on who plans a town in Pakistan)

12. State the criticism of planning made on behalf of the poor, explain how the harm happens, and answer it. (The section on the case against planning, from its critics)

13. What does SDG Target 11.3 ask of countries, and why does its second indicator show how far planning has moved since 1909? (The section on where town planning stands now)

14. The paper rewards three kinds of drawing. Name them, say when you use each, and say which kind the planning cycle is. (From the chapter on how to sit the Town Planning paper)