National-level planning in democratic countries has been almost all but ignored by researchers in urban and regional planning since the reconstruction years following the Second World War. Having become identified in many people’s eyes with communist regimes and coercive government practices, national-level planning fell into some disrepute. Yet, this book will show that planning is carried out on the national level to some degree in each and every one of the ten countries studied, even though the goals, degree of comprehensiveness, subjects, institutions, format, powers and effectiveness differ widely from country to country. There are even modest trends whereby, on...

Listed in order of importance, three levels of government in the United States exercise legal authority over land-use planning and regulation: the local level, the state level, and the national level. This article addresses the least important, the national level, concluding that the national government fundamentally does not practisede jureorde factonational land-use planning and regulation as that term would be specified and understood internationally. Instead, local governments and, increasingly, state governments play the dominant role in making and administering plans and regulations affecting the use of land.

Although not the generator of an orchestrated comprehensive national...

With a land area of 70282 square kilometres and a population of 3.62 million people, the Republic of Ireland is both one of the smallest and one of the least densely populated member states of the European Union. In European terms the country has been relatively poor and it constitutes a single Objective I region for assistance under EU structural funding programmes (i.e. less than 75 per cent of EU average per capita gross domestic product [GDP] in 1993).

Traditionally a predominantly rural society with a high dependence on agriculture, the country has undergone major economic and social transformations since...

The Kingdom of Sweden is the fourth largest country in Europe in terms of land area. Ten per cent of the land is cultivated and 50 per cent is covered by forest. The population is close to nine million, with a density of slightly more than 20 inhabitants per square kilometre. This low population density and the abundance of timber resources may lead one to expect sprawling settlements and spacious wooden single-family houses. This is, however, not the case. The population is largely concentrated in the metropolitan areas of Stockholm on the east coast, Gothenburg in the west and Malmö...

The United Kingdom has no national spatial plan for its land use. In this respect at least, it resembles the USA, and its current practice is distinctly different from those countries—like Israel and Japan—which do prepare, adopt and attempt to implement national plans. But, as this paper will attempt to demonstrate, these are distinctions which are not as sharp as they might first appear. There are indeed national-level institutions, and a well-established set of decision-making processes for spatial planning, in the United Kingdom. What is different is the relationship between central government and local government in the conduct...

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is a federation with 16Länder(states) and over 16000 municipalities which have strong, constitutionally guaranteed powers of self-government. The German spatial planning system is typical of north European planning systems in which there is a hierarchy of authorities, each producing planning instruments, based on a system of participation and consensus. In the German spatial planning system, the laws embody the principles for planning, and some of the plans, particularly at the local level, can also be laws.

An important feature of the German system is the constitution, theGrundgesetz, in which responsibilities are...

Denmark covers a land area of 43000 square kilometres, not including the self-governing regions of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The country’s population is 5.2 million, of which one-third lives in the capital region—Greater Copenhagen. Sixty-seven per cent of the country is devoted to agriculture, 12 per cent to forests, 11 per cent to semi-natural areas and 10 per cent to urban zones and transport installations.

The first Danish town planning act was passed in 1925. It was, however, not widely applied because the planning regulations entailed an economic risk since the municipal councils were held responsible for paying...

After the Second World War, France developed an economic planning system based on a wide industrial public sector and financial and regulatory instruments targeted at private firms. This reflected the leading role of the state in the economy and in society. The policy ofaménagement du territoire(regional development planning) emerged in the early 1950s to support regional economic development, to balance the dominance of Paris and to develop backward regions. The economic planning system and the policy ofaménagement du territoireeach gave rise to specific government institutions which were responsible to the head of government—the Commissariat Général...

Japan comprises four main islands, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu which, together with more than 6800 small islands, have a land area of 377800 square kilometres (Fig. 1). Japan’s population, at some 125 million, is ranked seventh in the world and second in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), and it now has the highest standard of living as measured by its per capita GNP (Foreign Press Centre Japan, 1996). The density levels of population per habitable hectare and GDP per habitable hectare are the highest in the world. These indicators point to the scarcity of habitable land...

The Dutch like the idea that foreigners visiting the Netherlands are more often than not impressed by the fact that the country looks tidy, clean and well organised. Needham (1989), speaks of a ‘manicured environment’. Dutch spatial planners like to think that they have contributed to that manicured environment and that they have ‘planned’ its development. But Needham warns the reader: ‘although there is massive public intervention with changing and maintaining the physical environment, and that massive public intervention indeed results in an overall good or even high quality, one would be wrong to include this under the planning system,...

Compared with most other Western countries, Israel has maintained a very high dosage of national-level planning institutions and powers. This is not surprising. Given Israel’s unique constraints and national goals, it should be a ‘natural’ for national-level planning. Yet, as our story will show, these institutions have not always functioned to the same degree or held the same status.

The exposition of national-level planning in Israel begins with an introduction to Israel’s ‘vital statistics’ and built-up form. Next comes a section that introduces the key national urban and regional policies in order to give the reader a feel for the...