No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
The Housing Act of 1954 authorized the federal government to subsidize municipal planning programs. As a result, planning firms produced “comprehensive plans” for rural towns at an increasing rate. After a decade of experience with these HHFA “701” “comprehensive” town plans, it became evident that there was a wide variation in quality and content of the plans. Plans varied from useful tools for guiding growth to useless documents containing no meaningful recommendations. The latter situation resulted when urban planners drafted plans for rural areas based on urban concepts with no significant input by local people. Also, administrators of the “701” program and students of regional planning had no accepted criteria to distinguish an acceptable rural town plan from a useless compilation of data. This situation allowed planners who lacked rural planning know-how to use urban planning concepts to develop nonrelevant “shelf” plans in performance of their “701” contracts. By 1968 this problem was generally recognized. As a result, a research project was developed at the University of Vermont (Hatch 212), to study town plans and planning. The project had two objectives: (1) to evaluate adopted rural town plans by measuring the quality and content of plans, thus separating implementable plans from nonimplementable plans, and plans with considerable content from plans with little content, and (2) to develop planning concepts and procedures relevant to rural areas. This paper is a progress report on the first objective—a proposal of a town plan analysis and evaluation system.
Assistance in developing this system supplied by John Lord, Rodney Griffin, Bruce Hyde, and John Maher is gratefully acknowledged.
2/ The word “town” in this report refers to the New England political entity which is called a township in other areas.Google Scholar
3/ For a report on the second objective—development of planning concepts and procedures relevant to rural towns—see this Journal, Volume III, Number 1, p. 125, May 1974.Google Scholar
4/ This study was conducted by Rodney E. Griffin, graduate assistant, and is reported in his Master's thesis.Google Scholar
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.