Effective practitioners in any field understand that lessons from the past underlie successes in the future. Which practices have worked before and which haven’t? What went wrong, and what does that teach us? Too often, however, urban and regional planners simply don’t know whether or how well planning policies were carried out.

Evaluating Urban and Regional Plans blends theory and practice to delineate the questions that planners need to ask as they shape the future of Canadian communities. Mark Seasons offers a wealth of pragmatic guidance on comprehensive plan evaluation processes and methods. Monitoring the outputs and outcomes generated by a plan – and gauging their impact – ensures that the planning function remains relevant, and that resources are used effectively, efficiently, and equitably.

As both a primer on plan evaluation practice and an original contribution to theory, Evaluating Urban and Regional Plans is an invaluable resource not only for the Canadian planning community but for planners everywhere.

Mark Seasons' profile page

Mark Seasons, FCIP, RPP, is a professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. He is a fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners and a registered professional planner with career experience in Ontario, Alberta, and New Zealand. His planning research has been published in several leading academic journals, and in UN-Habitat’s Global Report on Human Settlements 2009: Planning Sustainable Cities.

The combination of theories, methods and practices makes this book an essential resource for all professional planners in Canada and elsewhere.

Plan Canada

Scholarship has been differentiated into many categorizations, including scholarship of discovery versus scholarship of synthesis...Evaluating Urban and Regional Plans contributes to both.

Journal of the American Planning Association

This new text is a must-read in undergraduate and graduate planning classrooms.

Canadian Planning and Policy