Regional Planning

a review of Defining and Planning the Regional Context by Barbara and Regional Planning: Historic
and Contemporary Developments by Frederic R. Steiner
by Bima Fatwa Muharram

As a part of the built environment, a region is needed to be considered in the process of spatial
planning. There might be a question why we need to consider the regional scale? It is because the
problem occur in smaller scale sometimes comes from bigger scale. The problems that occur in the
neighbourhood might be come from the city. Also, region can be the uniter of several groups of
community in the area. This will help to reduce the conflict between groups. Region itself includes four
components of Built Environment: city, landscape, structure, interior, and product. Unlike the other
components, the region is very wide in the scale of the built environment and it is hard to define.
Sometimes, western US is a region, but Southwest California is also a region. This disparity indicates
that region defined by the purpose of the subject itself.
Region can be determined by two aspects: ecological and political. For the ecological,
sometimes it is related to the river and the basin. Determination of the region based on ecological aspects
may be easy, but there is some impact. Not every terrain of the basin is suitable for living. For example,
if a region only has high terrain, then it will be hard to do some activities that need low terrain. That is
why political determination might be the good solution. Political determination can be based on the
economical aspect. So, region A and region B might have various types of activities that can boost the
economy.
As the political region seems better than ecological, the aspect of the environment sometimes
be ignored because the focus is on the economy. The focus of regional planning needs to be equal in
both environmental and ecological aspects. This will be resulted in Place Based Regional Planning. As
an addition, social aspects also need to be considered as a focus in regional planning. Three of them
will create sustainable development that not only benefits the current condition, but also the future
conditions. For example, regional planning after WW 2 mostly focused on economic growth and it
made them ignore the environment aspect. As a result, we cannot enjoy the benefit that comes from the
development from WW 2. But, if today we make a regional plan based on sustainable development.
Maybe the people in the year 2050 or 3000 can enjoy the benefit of today's planning.
The practice of planning today also can be easier than the old times. Today we have many
technologies that contain information about spatial data. The information even better with the existence
if the visual data. Not only giving information, but we can also program that information to create new
information and apply it on the field. There are many mapping tools that can be for making map that
include visualized spatial data and it can be a guide for developing a region Also, the easier practice in
spatial planning will help us to discover more findings about spatial planning.