The city plan embodies the gesture by which man takes possession of space, impressing on that space the ordering of his mind and devising a comprehensible man-made world for himself and his creations. (Norma Evenson 1966)
City planning is based on the idea that life will imitate design. At its very core lies the idea of social engineering which assumes that planning itself could bring about larger social transformation. Planners strongly believe that social processes and spatial forms are related. In other words, planning is based on the idea that there are social consequences of built environment.
In the earlier lectures we have discussed how urban planning was the outcome of urban crisis generated by the industrial crisis of the early 19th century. Social reformers such as Robert Owen and Ebenezer Howard were some of the first social reformers who had thought about new principles of planning that they hoped would ameliorate the condition.
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