The purpose of this paper is to describe urban planning trends in the so-called “developed
countries”. And indeed, the countries under examination will be precisely those still falling
under this category. Throughout this paper, however, the vast region to which they belong
will be referred to as “The North”. One reason for this is that, to this author as well as to many
others, it is increasingly difficult to define to what kind of end state the terms “developed” and
its complementary one, “Developing”, should represent, or aspire to. When the term was
coined, it was universally believed that development referred largely to the improvement of
economic performance. Then, in 1989, came UNDP’s historic definition of “human development”, which expanded the concept of development to include such factors as educational
attainment, health, and gender parity. After that, we began to see that “development” was a
moveable object whose contours depended on the bundle of indicators chosen to define and
measure it.
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