The future of spatial planning 

•	The 21st century will be the century when the world as a whole will for the first time turn predominantly urban in the sense that we understand this term today. 

•	This does not mean that urbanization will necessarily lead to cultural uniformity. 

•	National cultures survive and thrive under urbanization in even the most economically advanced countries. 

•	Different 	societies, different cities confront different challenges that call for new approaches to planning. 

• Planning needs to become more innovative, less regulatory, more entrepreneurial. 

• The 	old planning was limited in its scope to physical design. Increasingly, however, planners are challenged to address urban issues from a perspective of sustainability, with its overlapping economic, environmental, and socio-cultural dimensions. 

• In any given situation, it is 	a matter of balancing these concerns, of setting priorities without forgetting that all three are important for urban development. 
• To be effective, planning needs to 	be done at different scales that range from neighborhood and district to regional, national, and even multi-national levels. 

• Inter-city competition, particularly for global capital, is a race to nowhere that is ultimately extremely costly not only in terms of money but also in the neglect of some of the most important assets of a region. Planners would therefore do well to consider amore endogenously based development which builds a city's strength on its human, social, cultural, intellectual, environmental, and other assets or resources. In other words, a city that desires sustainability is one that thinks of its development as a process generated from within its own unique strengths and relative advantages. 

• The culture of cities is an amalgam of differences. Some of these are historically given, others arise in the course of urbanization through migration, cultural exchanges, and the images that modem technologies disseminate worldwide. In addition, population is diverse, with different needs in the course of the human life cycle. 

• Over the past several decades, the concept of a civil society has come into circulation along with a discourse on human and citizen rights. Practicing planners must face more than a discourse, however, when they confront civil society organizations that resist projects in their neighborhoods, make demands, claim rights and who, above all, want to be heard and taken seriously by the authorities. They want to be part of the action, not merely its objects. Increasingly, especially among the more marginalized sectors of the population, civil society organizations are prepared to enter into a new social contract or partnership with the local state, in ways that not only give them a voice indecisions affecting their life and livelihood but mobilize their own not inconsiderable resources in housing developments, the construction of community facilities, and the like. 

• The idea of a 'master plan or the more recent invention of an integrated urban development plan (India and South Africa)in which all elements are brought together in a neat package of an encompassing single vision for the city may be an intellectually satisfying concept but is not a practical idea. Aside from the huge uncertainties that such a plan must essentially set aside, its ability to serve as a template for the multiple public agencies of the city, not to mention the competitive private sector, foreign investors, and civil society organizations and social movements is virtually nil. The plan may serve a variety of other purposes, but its end  product is a document rather than innovative actions in the real world.