What are the drawbacks in your city?What changes would you recommend as a town planner?
Answers
Answer:
A town planner is responsible for the design and development of urban areas, such as towns and cities. As a town planner, you would ensure there is balance between demands on the land being developed and the needs of the community.
Answer:
The advantages of town planning would be, among many, fair and equal distribution of services (like water, electricity, waste removal), effective public transport planning, effective resource management, proper distribution of public facilities, hospitals, schools etc. Town planning can set policy that protects lower income families from being marginalized to the outskirts of the city, where there are fewer work opportunities.
Also, and harder to define, general comfortability of a city, it’s walkability, the scale of buildings in relation to humans, to open spaces and to eachother, are all dictated by town planning and building regulations.
The disadvantages of town planning, is when town planning is used as a means for private entities, or government (local or national) to achieve their own agendas. It can mean that people in certain areas do not receive adequate services, policies can be put in place that benefit private development companies over individual citizens, if town planning is not equitable, people can be forced out of homes and communities by gentrification and inflated rates or rent.
That being said, some cities or town’s develop very well without the use of town planning, Venice of often cited, not just for it’s aesthetic value, but the high level of comfort that is experienced as a pedestrian, and the Old City was largely unplanned. And New York City, with the ‘help’ of Robert Moses, demolished blocks of buildings that constituted very tight knit communities, but were not valued by the the town planners of the time, over elevated highways in the quest for ‘greater mobility & connectedness’, now most of the shore of the island are completely inaccessible due to the perimeter of highways.
So in conclusion, Town planning is good when it’s good, and bad when it’s bad, and when there is none at all it could be bad, but it might be good.