The sector includes urban planning, regional planning, metropolitan planning, land use planning, rural planning, regional resource planning and environmental planning. It concerns itself with the scientific, aesthetic and orderly disposition of land and resources and the location of facilities, buildings and services over a given territory. Professional planning is a multidisciplinary, knowledge-based activity with roots in engineering, law, architecture, public health, geography, ecology, economics and social sciences.

Planners play an important, knowledge-based, strategic and integrative role - usually at the conceptualization or pre-development stage - with respect to the design, timing and the spatial-environmental realization of all capital projects and construction activity. They combine design and analysis skills, are linkage builders and facilitators and possess strong problem solving, consensus finding and team building skills. Planning know-how and planning products (urban development models, official plans, zoning tools, land use by-laws, development standards, planning procedures, organizational/institutional models) constitute one of Canada's leading-edge design service as well as public sector technology.