Introduction: Planning for Development

City and regional planning serves the public. Beyond the provision of public goods, an economically limited concept, planning also supports the functioning and the reproduction of the capitalist economy, intervenes into the market when economically weaker social groups fall off the market, guides planned growth, and responds to - unplanned‖ growth. This - modern planning practice‖ largely - not totally - assumes that societies are economies: Even when education and health care are at a high level as Sri Lanka and Kerala in the 1940s through the 1970s, hardly any development specialist claimed the country was developed. If the GNP goes up, even the people have become poorer, as in post-1970s Sri Lanka, the experts would take note of it. This development discourse is followed by professionals and academics across the world, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. Myanmar where I put this issue together had been closed to Western influence for about six decades and does not have a fully established planning system, but it still follows the same modern planning ethos.