Best City Plan: Tell Us Why It Is Excellent

Last Updated: December 6, 2022

We hope this page does not become a contest for the best city plan, but more of an illustration of the wide variety of city or neighborhood plans that might be considered great plans.

Here our visitors are able to share brief descriptions of a city plan that they consider exemplary. This section of our website features stories and photos submitted by you, the readers, and then reviewed for appropriateness by our editors. 

Maybe we will have a comment about your nominee for best city plan, but maybe what you write will be so evocative that your report or review stands on its own.

Ideally, tell us about a plan that is actually being implemented, or maybe one that already is completed! How did politics, implementation considerations, detailed engineering or architectural drawings, or construction snags alter the plan? Did the anticipate what could go wrong? In retrospect, did it provide enough flexibility?

What makes the plan good? Is the success of this city plan partly attributable to the process by which it was derived or to the amount of community dialogue it stirred up, or was it strictly a product of professional genius? Do you think of it as "best" because it is being followed and working out well?  Is it specific, is it vague, is it policy-centered, or is it implementation-heavy? How is the length and level of detail in the plan affecting your judgment?  Does the format of the plan include goals, objectives, and policies, or does it simply consist of simple declarative sentences?

Maybe your ideal plan is simply a diagram or a rendering, and if so, tell us why you find it compelling.

As you can see if you read elsewhere on this website, we especially like short, direct, gutsy, and principled plans that reflect lots of thought and research, rather than reflexive data collection and data analysis that does not seem to contribute to the final product.

Most plans require at least some element of mapping, and many require diagrams, tables, photos, and graphics to establish either the existing conditions or the desired future condition of a neighborhood, small area, town, or city.  Again, our opinion based on professional experience is that cities and towns should curate the map collection, leaving maps that do not contribute to the final argument in a file somewhere in city hall.

Our opinion is that after the first few examples, most people won't dig into diagrams and tables that do not seem germane to the main principles and threads of the plan. Likewise, eyes will glaze over if presenting maps simply because you, your staff, or your consultant generated them, even if they turn out not to be pertinent.

We have to make an exception for photographs, however. Residents seem to have an almost limitless appetite for seeing photos of places and conditions. If the plan is presented graphically, that goes double for video.

Many great plans are based on extensive and literal use of the classic planning process, in which data collection, formulation of alternatives, and then study, analysis, and ranking of the alternatives is conducted before a final plan is written and illustrated through both maps and drawings.  But we rank quality of thinking over perfection of form every single time. 

Below is a form where you can give us a short--we emphasize short--narrative about why this is one of the best city plans and what we all can learn from it. Also you can send some photos or graphics relevant to the finished product if you wish.

It should be interesting to read the results. It is too rare that those who do community and city planning actually are subject to validation from users and citizens. So this is your time, regardless of where you stand on the amateur to professional spectrum, to talk about the best city plan and to justify your opinion.

Showcase Your Nominee for Best City Plan

Do you have an opinion about the best city plan you have seen? (When we say city, we mean community, neighborhood, sub-area, or metropolitan region, too.) Maybe you wrote it! Well, if so, don't be shy, whether you are in the public sector or working as a consultant.  Share your story, telling us why this plan is "the best."

Probably people would like to know how you went about arriving at the plan, how much and what type of citizen input was involved, whether you met resistance, how you dealt with complexities and missing data, how those in power responded, and other such common elements of planning. If we choose to publish your submission (and we will, if our readers can understand it), you will have a web page you can use with your social media or other publicity.

Below the form we show links to previously published pages in this section. As you can see, there is a lot of room for you to stand out!

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