After the Plans: Methods to Evaluate the Implementation Success of Plans

Abstract

In light of the continuing and ever-stronger attacks on the legitimacy of the planning profession, planning scholars have recently been calling for quantitative studies that support the notion that planning matters. What is needed are methodologies that can be used by planners to assess the degree of impact their plans have had on actual urban development and, perhaps more important, on the achievement of planning goals. Such methods would differ from existing evaluation research in that the focus would be on assessing what has in fact occurred in the built environment, rather than on evaluating various plan alternatives before implementation. In this paper, I outline various plan assessment methods that delineate how one particular aspect of plans-identifying where public facilities are to be located—can be evaluated.