URP | Urban and Regional Planning

Steering and managing the growth of cities and city-regions is both a topical and a timely challenge. An obvious and perhaps simplistic answer to addressing this challenge is through planning. Yet, planning as a discipline and a practice is visionary and futuristic. By extension, it is aspirational and often utopian. This is especially true for rapidly urbanizing and developing countries like India. Translating these visions into actions and decisions that improve the quality of life and the larger development parameters across geographies requires reconciliation between the present and the future. Adequately informed and effectively designed public policies serve to achieve this reconciliation. In other words, public policies are a critical pathway to translate planning visions and aspirations into action. Thus, it is important to understand interface between public policy and planning, its relevance for students and aspiring academics as well as practitioners keen to align with cities and their growth and management.