“The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City”

According to Peter Hall, the first planning paradigm of the modern era viewed urban planning as essentially architecture writ large. Urban planning is a political process that requires planners to choose among conflicting values. Effective urban planning requires planners to interact with citizens, ideally along the higher rungs of Sherry Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation. The early urban planners who viewed urban planning as a branch of systems analysis were pioneers in using computers at a time when computers were new, costly, and hard to use. Neo-Marxist urban theory was an important part of academic urban planning discourse throughout the 1970s. About 1955, city planning at last became legitimate.…