Residential Areas: Planning Perceptions and Preferences

The location, structure and design of residential areas comprise some of the most absorbing problems facing planners to-day. The private and social needs of urban families are intimately affected by the physical arrangements of living, and the seemingly infinite variety of private aspirations and social whims indicate the complexity of the subject which is now the object of much research and experimentation by social scientists and planners.
To date few generalizations about residential area planning have been sufficiently tested to enable planners to employ them with confidence in the preparation of proposals for development, but certain recurring themes can be discerned in the theoretical literature and in practice, and these will be explored in the first part of this chapter before a pilot investigation undertaken as part of the Planning Standards Study is described.