A Review of Planning Policies

Transparency. A demand more than just a word to define a see-through object and one that is clearly at ends with what many people in the political realm may truly desire.
It is a word worth considering when discussing public infrastructure projects and when shifting our focus from sustaining a political system to supporting actual infrastructure.
The intent of this blog post is to host as a nesting place for the differences, strengths and weakness of the planning and development process of many major cities.
Unfortunately, looking through law documents is a strenuous and very long process and sometimes an idea and an article must grow piece by piece. This is one of those.
Objective driven more than anything, my efforts are to bring to light some of the discrepancies among US politics and those of our ancestors (that's right, ancestors, they've been doing this a lot longer) in Europe.

Analysis
I'd like to review the planning processes of major cities with a rubric in mind:

• Transparency
  • When a project comes underway how open was the idea?
  • Was it available AND pushed by a political official or was it a project that stayed under wraps until development?
• Openness to Dissent
  • The general public should have the ability to vote yay or nay over some developments.
  • Are there any obstructions to developments? Are there any methods around those obstructions?
• Private vs. Public Origin
  • Are infrastructure projects that happen more beneficial to public transport option welfare or private entity benefits?
• More to come

I wanted to focus on a specific subset of cities that really demonstrate some of the differences in planning processes to an extreme degree. When performing any sort of data analysis, it's nice to know the average but the story is always in the outliers.

To once more state the objective for the blog post:
Assess the political differences that define cities infrastructure and development....
And, hell why not, give them all a grade.

Chicago gets an automatic F.


International

• Heidelberg
• Paris
• Moscow
• Milan
• Venice

USA

• Chicago
• NYC
• Atlanta
• Denver
• Portland
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco