Urban Development Urban Planning Problems

Urban Development

Urban Planning Problems in the Developing World: A Literature Review

In order to adequately and accurately address the problems that might be faced with urban planning in developing countries and regions of the world, several key pieces of information will need to be found. First, the identification of problems that exist in urban planning generally should be found, and a general idea of developing parts of the world where urban planning is currently taking place would also form a part of the preliminary information need to fully research this issue. Then, an examination of these areas and the specific problems they are facing in terms of urban planning can take place, and finally an assessment of how these problems are similar to and/or differ from urban planning problems generally can be conducted. Collecting this information should be relatively easy using appropriate search terms entered into academic databases; specific terms that will be utilized will include "urban plan* AND problems OR issues OR barriers," "urban develop* regions," "third world urban plan*," and "urban plan* AND develop* world."

Though the basic searches that will lead to the gathering of the necessary information are rather simplistic at the outset, it is expected that several constraints will make this research more difficult than it appears on the surface. Many of these search terms are likely to result in the return of many sources and articles that will not be useful to the research at hand, forming the primary constraint. As research is conducted, more refined search terms will present themselves to the researcher that can be used to narrow down the scope of the returned sources and articles. There is also the potential that abundant information will not exist on this topic, or at least in some of the subtopics identified, which would also constrain the possibility of research to a large degree.

Literature Review

A major problem facing urban planers generally, both in the developed and the developing worlds, is that f traffic congestion -- growth automatically means higher volumes of traffic, and limiting congestion is a way to increase the rate of growth, yet growth also leads to congestion thus creating something of a catch-22 situation (Tennoy 2010). Despite a realization of this issue and a concurrent acknowledgement that increased congestion causes increased pollution, planners tend to use traditional modes to frame this problem and new innovations have not been forthcoming (Tennoy 2010). The regulations and development plans for improved ecological impacts that exist are also left unnoticed by long-term urban planning projects, creating an extreme imbalance between stated values and policies and the realities oof urban development (BenDor & Doyle 2010).

Identifying regions of the world that can be considered as "developing" rather than "developed" does not really require the use of strict definitions, and instead broad regions can be loosely classified as "developing" with little debate or objection (Watson 2009; Beall et al. 2010). By examining proportions of populations that live in rural areas and the level of infrastructure that exists in broad regions of the world, these classifications can be made with a great deal of assurance -- Central Africa, for example, is much more a "developing" part of the world, while Southern and Northern Africa are already largely developed, with undeveloped pockets in existence in some countries (Beall et al. 2010). The entire Southern Hemisphere of the world is also generally far less developed than the Northern Hemisphere, which contains Europe and North America, though there are some notable exceptions to this gross generalization (Watson 2009).

In addition to the ecological and logistical problems that face urban planning and development projects the world over, there are some unique issues in the developing world that need to be taken into account. Specifically, ongoing political unrest -- which is often accompanied by fragmented and/or wholly independent armed forces or militias -- can lead to hindrances in the planning and implementation of urban development projects, and can actually lead to the physical destruction of existing or developing infrastructure (Davis 2010). Another problem that is somewhat unique to the developing world, but that also occurs to some degree in developed countries and regions, is determining the most effective land use during urban planning and development projects (Raddad et al. 2010). Specifically, in the developing world there is still an abundance of land that is used for agriculture, whether it is especially arable or not; shifting the use of large swaths of land to urban centers requires a massive assessment of how the basic economy and simple nutritional provision of the country/region will be accomplished (Raddad et al. 2010).