Empirical conclusions of implementing local plans in rural municipalities: the current planning effect confronting obsolete building regulation legislation

Abstract

This presentation evaluates the activity of a specific team of practitioners confronted with the task of this planning process in various geographic locations and socioeconomic conditions. Although it is by no means systematic, the attempt focuses on the common methodological problems of the process itself in actual practice. The main focus of the evaluation is the real development processes met in the field in rural and small town areas and the role of local community dynamics in facing the planning process and the principles of sustainable development in specific terms.

Any effort to introduce planning methods and controls in rural areas outside "city plan limits” is bound to clash with the existing largely outdated legislative body of building rules and regulations governing uniformly the entire country. It is a rather unique body of complex regulations adapted now and then according to urbanization pressures of specific sectors of the economy based on a purely "non-planning” philosophy or better on an instrument of spatial anarchy in disguise. The process of developing and finally approving the local plans unveils a number of weaknesses in the mechanism and tools available at the planners’ disposal as well as predictable and unpredictable community reactions and resistances.

An initial proposal for more effective and flexible regulation schemes for rural areas is suggested drawn from successful use of tested planning mechanisms.