Planning And Knowledge

This book uses an international perspective and draws on a wide range of new conceptual and empirical material to examine the sources of conflict and cooperation within the different landscapes of knowledge that are driving contemporary urban change. Based on the premise that historically-established systems of regulation and control are being subject to unprecedented pressures, scholars critically reflect on the changing role of planning and governance in sustainable urban development, looking at how a shift in power relations between expert and local cultures in western planning processes has blurred the traditional boundaries between public, private, and voluntary sectors.

The field of urban planning is far-reaching in breadth and depth. This is due to the complex nature of cities, regions, and development processes. The knowledge domain of planning includes social, economic, technological, environmental, and political systems that continue to evolve and expand rapidly. Understanding these systems is an inter-disciplinary endeavor at the scale of several academic fields. The wide range of topics considered by planning educators and practitioners are often based on varying definitions of "planning" and modes of planning practice. This unique book discusses various elements and contributions to urban planning research to show that seemingly disparate topics do in fact intersect and together, contribute to ways of understanding urban planning. The objective is not to discuss how to "do" research, but rather, to explore the context of urban planning scholarship with implications for the planning academy and planning practice. This edited volume includes chapters contributed by a diverse range of planning scholars who consider the corpus of planning scholarship both historically and critically in their area of expertise. It is essential reading for students of planning research and planning theory from around the world.

A compact guide to knowledge management, this book makes the subject accessible without oversimplifying it. Organizational issues like strategy and culture are discussed in the context of typical knowledge management processes. The focus is always on pointing out all the issues that need to be taken into account in order to make knowledge management a success. The book then goes on to explore the role of information technology as an enabler of knowledge management relating various technologies to the knowledge management processes, showing the reader what can, and what cannot, be achieved through technology. Throughout the book, references to lessons learned from past projects underline the arguments. Managers will find this book a valuable guide for implementing their own initiatives, while researchers and system designers will find plenty of ideas for future work.

This book provides a state of the art approach to participatory planning, and generates innovative thought in planning theory and knowledge study. The book introduces a new conceptual framework for participatory planning, one which redefines concepts that have been taken for granted for too long: those of “public participation” and “local knowledge”. It draws on the rich repertoire of public participation practices that have developed globally over the last 50 years, and investigates the following questions: Which participatory practices most effectively capture residents’ genuine spatial needs, perceptions and desires? And how can these be incorporated into actual plans? The book is based on an empirical comparative examination of the effectiveness of various participatory processes, and proposes practical solutions for public participation through two new instruments: the Practices Evaluation Tool, and the Participatory Methods Ladder. These instruments calibrate participation methods according to certain criteria, in order to improve their ability to extract local knowledge and incorporate it into planning deliverables. These new instruments correspond to and elaborate on Arnstein’s ladder - the 1969 theoretical landmark for participatory planning. Both academics and practitioners in the area of urban and regional planning will find this book to be an invaluable resource, given the way it develops both theoretical and practical cutting-edge outcomes.

This book presents a comprehensive review for Knowledge Engineering tools and techniques that can be used in Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. KE tools can be used to aid in the acquisition of knowledge and in the construction of domain models, which this book will illustrate. AI planning engines require a domain model which captures knowledge about how a particular domain works - e.g. the objects it contains and the available actions that can be used. However, encoding a planning domain model is not a straightforward task - a domain expert may be needed for their insight into the domain but this information must then be encoded in a suitable representation language. The development of such domain models is both time-consuming and error-prone. Due to these challenges, researchers have developed a number of automated tools and techniques to aid in the capture and representation of knowledge. This book targets researchers and professionals working in knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and software engineering. Advanced-level students studying AI will also be interested in this book.

"This book covers theoretical, thematic, and country-specific issues of knowledge cities to underline the growing importance of KBUD all around the world, providing substantive research on the decisive lineaments of urban development for knowledge-based production (drawing attention to new planning processes to foster such development), and worldwide best practices and case studies in the field of urban development"--Provided by publisher.

Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge describes an innovative methodology for investigating the conceptual structures that underlie human reasoning. This work explores the nature of planning strategies--the abstract patterns of planning behavior that people recognize across a broad range of real world situations. With a sense of scale that is rarely seen in the cognitive sciences, this book catalogs 372 strategies across 10 different planning domains: business practices, education, object counting, Machiavellian politics, warfare, scientific discovery, personal relationships, musical performance, and the anthropomorphic strategies of animal behavior and cellular immunology. Noting that strategies often serve as the basis for analogies that people draw across planning situations, this work attempts to explain these analogies by defining the fundamental concepts that are common across all instances of each strategy. By aggregating evidence from each of the strategy definitions provided, the representational requirements of strategic planning are identified. The important finding is that the concepts that underlie strategic reasoning are of incredibly broad scope. Nearly 1,000 fundamental concepts are identified, covering every existing area of knowledge representation research and many areas that have not yet been adequately formalized, particularly those related to common sense understanding of mental states and processes. An organization of these concepts into 48 fundamental areas of knowledge and representation is provided, offering an invaluable roadmap for progress within the field.

John Friedmann addresses a central question of Western political theory: how, and to what extent, history can be guided by reason. In this comprehensive treatment of the relation of knowledge to action, which he calls planning, he traces the major intellectual traditions of planning thought and practice. Three of these--social reform, policy analysis, and social learning--are primarily concerned with public management. The fourth, social mobilization, draws on utopianism, anarchism, historical materialism, and other radical thought and looks to the structural transformation of society "from below." After developing a basic vocabulary in Part One, the author proceeds in Part Two to a critical history of each of the four planning traditions. The story begins with the prophetic visions of Saint-Simon and assesses the contributions of such diverse thinkers as Comte, Marx, Dewey, Mannheim, Tugwell, Mumford, Simon, and Habermas. It is carried forward in Part Three by Friedmann's own nontechnocratic, dialectical approach to planning as a method for recovering political community.