Can Individual Planners Make Communities Safer? A Study of the Use of Discretion in Managing Urban Development

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  • March 20, 2019
Creator
  • Stevens, Mark Robert
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of City and Regional Planning
Abstract
  • Land use planning has been conceived of as a competitive game in which land use planners are expected to safeguard the public interest. To help further the public interest, communities adopt comprehensive land use plans that are intended to guide land use activities in a desired direction that achieves community goals. However, the adoption of a comprehensive plan is not sufficient to guarantee that community goals will be achieved. Plans must also be implemented, and done so in such a way that plan policies are reflected in particular land use decisions. Because planners are typically responsible for the implementation of comprehensive plans and because they must typically make some decisions regarding which regulations apply and how they should be implemented, they may serve to either help or hinder the achievement of community goals depending upon their personal commitments to the policies and regulations they are supposed to implement. Using the extent to which flood hazard mitigation features are incorporated into particular development projects as a measure of plan implementation, this study examines the association between planners’ commitment to natural hazard mitigation and the incorporation of those flood hazard mitigation features. Unlike previous studies, this study focuses on the commitment to hazard mitigation of individual planners, rather than that of planning agencies. This study also examines the implications of planners’ role orientations (i.e. planners’ beliefs regarding appropriate behaviors), a subject not yet studied within the context of natural hazard mitigation. Surveys of 68 development project site plans and interviews with four local government planners are used to assess the associations between planner characteristics and flood hazard mitigation features in the development projects. Findings show significant associations between planners’ commitment and role orientations with flood hazard mitigation features. The associations vary in magnitude and direction across mitigation features and planner characteristics, raising the possibility that different commitments and behaviors on the part of planners might influence flood hazard mitigation (and plan implementation) in different ways. An agenda for future research is laid out that can help address as-yet-unanswered questions regarding the causal nature of the relationship between planner characteristics and plan implementation.
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  • In Copyright
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  • Berke, Philip
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  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 19, 2010

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