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PLANNING VISIONS AND 
DEVELOPMENT CONTROL
With the caveat that national government in America
lacks an agenda for sustainable development, the
broad policy objectives in much British planning
would be familiar to most American planners. The
most fundamental variation resides in the relationship
between planning for the future and the regulation
of development to achieve that goal. In America the
creation of strategies to guide development (planning)
is crucially sundered from the mechanisms of devel-
opment control (zoning). In Britain, and in Europe
generally, the two functions are indivisible: regula-
tion of development is carried out in accordance
with the adopted plan. This is far from the case in
America.
Public plans are usually generalized and advisory
only; they have no force of law and are frequently
ignored when influential people or wealthy develop-
ers are applying to build projects that contradict the
official plan. In one famous moment of American
planning democracy during the 1990s, an elected
official in Charlotte, tiring of a lengthy discussion,
suggested that the city council adopt a plan on which
city staff and citizens had worked long and hard for
many months. ‘I move we adopt this plan,’ she said.
‘It’s only a plan and we don’t have to abide by it.’
CHAPTER FIVE
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GROWTH MANAGEMENT, DEVELOPMENT CONTROL AND URBAN DESIGN
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Within a few months, that same council member cast
a crucial vote in favor of a large development that
completely contradicted the adopted plan. These
cavalier sentiments and actions could be, and usually
are repeated in every city across the USA.
In our home state of North Carolina, a state legis-
lator introduced a bill in 2003 that tried, in some
small way, to remedy this situation. The bill proposed
that in cases where a municipality rezoned land for
development that contradicted its official plan, then
the public authority would have to provide detailed
reasons for its decisions. Some city attorneys opposed
the bill on the grounds that establishing such a legal
connection between community plans and zoning
decisions could mean that cities would face lawsuits
from citizens who wanted the plan upheld! Many
elected officials don’t want to stick to the plan they’ve
adopted on the grounds that this gives them ‘flexibil-
ity.’ By contrast, citizens and planners view this ‘flex-
ibility’ merely as ‘wiggle-room’ for elected members
to accommodate the ever-changing demands of
developers. This inconsistency between adopted plan
and permitted development brings great frustration
to planning staff and to citizens who work hard in
the democratic process of producing the plan. At
the time of writing this book, the bill to improve the
planning situation was stalled in the legislative
process.
There is little interest in many state legislative
bodies to deal with problems like this. Again, in
North Carolina (which is no better or worse in this
regard than most states) elected officials in state
government receive a lot of campaign money from
developers, builders and real estate agents, cash that
buys these groups influence with the lawmakers. This
may sound close to corruption to non-American
ears, but using money to buy access to politicians is a
protected right of ‘free speech’ under the First
Amendment of the Constitution. We suspect it’s not
quite what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but
that’s how it’s been interpreted by the courts in recent
decades. According to a report in