To sustainability through interdisciplinary planning: a planners perspective

There are many terms describing planning for towns and settlements. The term 'Town and Regional Planning' has been commonly used in the British Commonwealth countries while ‘Urban Planning’ and Land Use Planning’ has been more popular in the USA. Frequently used terms are also: 'Physical Planning'; 'Town and Country Planning' ;'Spatial Planning' and 'Settlement Planning', a favoured UN term. In Queensland, Australia, the recent Integrated Planning Act 1997 applied a term of 'Planning'. The term ‘Environmental Planning’, also well known, was defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as: "...a process whereby regional, national or subnational resource conservation or development plans are created in ways that consciously seek to minimise long term negative effects on existing levels of environmental quality ..." There are, however, views which consider Environmental Planning as all planning, that is, including planning for regions, towns and settlements of various kind (see, for instance, Faludi, 1987, Evans, 1997 or the actual New South Wales planning legislation). For this paper, originated in Queensland, the use of the term ‘planning’ was thought the appropriate choice.