Today's Comprehensive Plan - by John Zeanah (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new model for planning that creates the plan as a living process, rather than a static document

How does your community map out a long-term vision for the built environment? Most US cities and counties have long used the comprehensive plan for this purpose. While the plan was conceived to meet the existential issues of the twentieth century, too often today's plans fail to consider fragmented political and market environments, how implementation occurs, and how plans should adapt over time. How can this critical tool be updated for today's challenges?

In Today's Comprehensive Plan: An Adaptive Approach, planner John Zeanah builds on his experience leading the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan--the city's first comprehensive plan in forty years--to help planners create better, more adaptive plans and more effective outcomes. Zeanah offers a new approach: the adaptive comprehensive plan, a model grounded in implementation, participatory adaptation, and structured intervals for recalibration.

Zeanah demonstrates how plans can evolve through cycles of action and learning, ensuring that strategies remain relevant as conditions change. By highlighting the connection of vision and strategy, the importance of structured flexibility, and how to orient the plan for implementation pathways, he equips planners with practical methods for making comprehensive plans successful and keeping plans alive through change.

Today's Comprehensive Plan is not about replacing the tools in the planner's toolbox. It is about better understanding these policies, tools, and methods of planning and implementation to improve the practice and effectiveness of comprehensive planning. It makes the case for the comprehensive plan as the cornerstone of continuous, inclusive, and equitable planning--guiding growth, development, connectivity, and opportunity in ways that respond to the realities of the twenty-first century. This book will be invaluable for planners and policymakers seeking to design plans that adapt, endure, and deliver results.

About the Author

John Zeanah is the Chief of Development and Infrastructure for the City of Memphis, Tennessee. In this role, he leads a cross-functional team of agencies responsible for planning, housing, transportation, public works, and community and economic development. Prior to this role, John served as the Director of the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development for over seven years. Among his accomplishments, John led the development and adoption of the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan, the city's first comprehensive plan in forty years and winner of the American Planning Association's Daniel Burnham Award of Excellence for a Comprehensive Plan in 2020 and a Charter Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2021. John is Principal and Owner of Interval, LLC, a planning and policy advisory firm that specializes in helping public sector clients better understand, implement, and improve their plans, policies, codes, regulations, and processes.