Issues in the Management of Urban Systems

Swain, H. & MacKinnon, R.D. (1975). Issues in the Management of Urban Systems. IIASA Collaborative Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: CP-75-004

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Abstract

Interest in national settlement systems, urban growth policies, and regional development has been growing rapidly in recent years. Two international conferences in 1971, in Eastern and Western Europe, signaled the academic coming-of-age of the field, and the forthcoming United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver will set the final seal of respectability on the notion that urban and regional issues matter in national development plans.

From the inception of urban-related work at IIASA in early 1974, there has been a keen interest in settlement systems and planning policy. In December 1974, some forty-three scholars from fifteen countries gathered here to share insights on research and policy in these areas. Two other volumes of contributed papers are separately available.

The present volume contains a brief account of the proceedings of the conference, abstracts of all contributed papers, and the full texts of many of the papers not published in the other two volumes. Naturally enough, what remains after the special-interest papers have been pared off is a bit of a hodge-podge, but, we hope, not an uninteresting one. In fact it is here, among the contributions too diverse to be classified under neat a priori headings, that much of the really intriguing and interesting material is to be found.

Grouping these papers into four categories sometimes does rough justice to their authors' ideas. Still, it seems useful to begin by contrasting policy issues with current practice, to move on to the theoretical issues thus raised, and to close with some consideration of where we go from here. At the beginning of each section we have tried to set the individual essays in a somewhat larger context.

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