Questions and Answers About Planning and Community Development Terms

Photo: No one quibbled about city planning or community development terms on a rainy day a couple of years ago at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. This quote from the Tennessee Valley Authority reads: "It is time to extend planning to a wider field, in this instance comprehending in one great project many states directly concerned with the basin of one of our greatest rivers."  It makes us planners smile.

Last Updated: June 13, 2024

This is the place for asking about the meaning of certain city planning and community development terms you may have heard, but don't fully understand.  We hope many plan commission members and others who serve on the volunteer boards of villages, towns, cities, and counties will find their way here and ask what they do not know in quiet anonymity.  You can omit your name and your town too.  The form is near the bottom of the page.

To be sure, we just started asking people to submit their community development-related questions in the early days of this website.  We did not sort them.  

One of the categories that we saw developing was a request for definitions, or more often the story behind the definitions, of certain terms.  These days anyone online can pick up the direct meaning through a simple search, but the nuances of things not repeated in the internet echo chamber about the everyday reality of certain concepts leaves us scratching our heads.

Part of the reason that the language of city planning and its related fields, such as community development and neighborhood activism, have become so complex is the regulatory aspect, whether that is through zoning, other development regulation such as subdivision regulation and environmental requirements, or form-based code and design review.

Another factor is that acronyms seem to multiply every month, and with such a wide variety of techniques, programs, and approaches being touted by governments, universities, and consultants, it can be very hard for a lay person to figure out what is being discussed sometimes.

So in the form below, please fill in your question about the jargon, and we will do our best not only to tell you today's popular definition, but also to talk about our personal experience with the idea or technique, and possibly any emerging research we think you might find interesting.

But in our experience, sometimes planning or community development terms are just copied from neighboring towns who used the same consultant, and at least in the case of planning or zoning, often they haven't been changed in many years. We should be so lucky as to have research on whether some of these language conventions are effective or not!

Another issue is whether the increasing complexity of planning regulations is really necessary or helpful. For instance, on this website, we recently answered a question about what we think the person asking it perceived as a conflict between performance standards and design standards. Each planning term has a distinctive meaning, but regulations under the two banners seemed to overlap in one city. Since we did not have the text in front of us, we four planners  involved in the predecessor website at that time could not tell if there was a real conflict between the two or not.

If I answer your question, you can look like you know what you're doing, whether you are a student, elected official, appointed board or commission member, or a citizen trying to be influential in the land use or comprehensive planning debates in your community.  Thanks for your participation.

Links to the questions others have asked, and the answers, are found just below the form.

1. Making a Good Community
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2. Community Challenges, Common Topics & Concepts
 > Questions and Answers about City Planning or Community Development Terms

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