The control of the design of town and country suffers from a lack of clearly stated policy, particularly as it applies to small areas. Too much is held in the mind of the planning officer. This can cause problems. Although changes to the urban and rural environments are largely incremental, there is rarely any framework to ensure consistency over time and place and thus to implement any coherent design philosophy.

As the development process requires negotiation between many parties, the lack of advance information creates uncertainty and delay. Moreover, members of the public do not feel involved in the processes as they have little that they can understand and respond to. What is needed is a new approach to policy making.

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This book proposes a new way forward. The need for negotiation requires that design goals and objectives be made explicit. They should be distinguished clearly from the criteria for their fulfilment, any advice on how they could be achieved and the legal and administrative procedures to be employed. A new concept, the design area, is proposed in place of uniform land-use notations.

Its use would enable design strategies, including mix of uses, to be shown, the stated objectives to vary from place to place and variations in the degree of intervention to be made explicit. In addition, a start is made on developing a more structured language with which to express changes to urban form. To make the plans more accessible to the negotiating parties and the general public, new developments in technology can come to our aid.

Computer-based visualization and multimedia techniques can provide a medium that is both more accessible, more interactive and less biased than the current documentation.