A Study On The Method Of Urban Master Planning Based On Scenario Planning

Urban structure is becoming more complicated, following the fast development of scientific technique and the marvelous change of social environment. In such a situation, it appears the character of uncertainty for the urban development. As for the uncertainty, it includes the diversification and variability of the major factors which affect the urban development. Moreover, these factors are difficult to predict the future trend. And some of them never exist before so that they can not indicate the urban development. However,traditional urban planning is frequently based upon the trends of the urban development, which analyzes the problems under current situation, and make planning strategy from the Incremental Planning Approach. However, such plans which are forecast the future by extrapolating from existing trends often fail to consider the variety of local conditions or the propensity for novel situations to create extraordinary surprises. Once the environment of future development changes notably, the planning depending upon extrapolating must deviated from the reality. This blindness to variety and surprise, which is often accompanied by a false certainty about the efficacy of management, can lead to costly failures.Facing the environment of rapid change, it is difficult to make out reasonable conception of future vision under traditional urban planning, which is short of flexibility, the problem is highlighted that the actual development deviates from the plan target. According to the enormous uncertainty in the current process of urban development, the paper make an attempt at to lead scenario planning into the process of urban master planning as the model, which changing the usual the method of thinking, helping planners to reflect the viewpoints as well-regulated, and explore an new method of how the possible future constructed for the uncertainty.This paper first analyses the uncertainty in the current urban development, and recalls the concept and procedure of the master planning based on the belief of certainty,pointing out the problems as China's urban master planning that can not meet the requirements of uncertainty and the request to develop the scenarios which consists with the uncertainty characteristics, which the scenario planning methods derives from to deal with future uncertainties. Then, the author explains what is scenario planning and its background. To clarify, several critical elements of scenario planning are proposed as well as how they are established, and in what environments they operate. Based on the above analysis, the paper focus on the practical value of urban planning when the scenario planning method has been applied, researching the characteristics of the urban master planning. In Part 4, this paper gives the exploratory description for the process of constructing urban scenario planning, focusing on the establishment and the evaluation of the scenarios, and briefly introducing the relative technology of establishment and the evaluation. In the end, we describe the vision of applying scenario planning to the urban planning and point out some attentions in scenario planning.