| This thesis examines the possibility of applying the concept of interest to public urban land use system planning, although it is not intended that the idea should be limited to urban planning.;The concept is considered in detail, as is the question of who can have interests. The conclusion on that is that individuals and the public are the only true categories of interest holders, although interest groups need to be recognised for practical reasons. Corporations and governments cannot be true interest holders.;The application of the concept was assessed in relation to the subject-matter of urban land use planning, and a typical land use planning process. The possibility of applying it to a hypothetical system of planning using the pragmatic method was also considered.;The final part looked at the 'institutions' of planning, that is, law, politics, professional planning, administration, and administrative tribunals, to see how they would likely relate to a planning system based on the use of the concept of interest. The conclusion was that there would be no insurmountable difficulties even If not all of these institutions would readily embrace the concept.;The idea was found to be plausible in so far as a comprehensive theory of interest-based urban land use planning was able to be worked out. By considering practical issues throughout, a strong presumption was raised that it would be feasible, although testing and further development of the idea would be necessary.;Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed method were reviewed. The expected benefits were ensuring that public urban land use system planning was humanistic, and providing a concept, or theme, around which a comprehensive theory of such planning could be constructed. Likely areas of difficulty were misunderstanding due to the lack of agreement on the meaning of the concept, although the meaning that should be adopted for the proposed purpose was spelt out. Secondly, a conservative attitude towards the use of concepts other than interest in planning and related disciplines could cause resistance to the adoption of the proposed method.;It was shown how the idea is largely novel, but that recently there has been increasing use of the concept of interest in the land use planning literature. |
