Adapted from Guttenberg's The Language of Planning", pp 27, 65.

Land-use terminology in planning follow patterns that suggest many lines of inquiry, each of which appropriates land-use vocabulary to serve its mode or purpose. LBCS recognizes this multiple purpose approach to characterizing land uses and provides a classification methodology that can differentiate between modes of planning. The three chief ones being "referential", "evaluative", and "prescriptive".

LBCS provides standard categories for referential uses. For evaluative and prescriptive lines of argument, the categories should reflect the appropriate evaluative or prescriptive argument. For instance, take the evaluative term, "open space". Not every unbuilt area is open space; neither is every built area not an open space. What makes a use "open" depends on many visual and non-visual characteristics that vary from application to application and from community to community. That is why there are no universal standards even if there are some regional usage conventions for such evaluative and prescriptive arguments. This does not mean that local communities cannot adopt evaluative or prescriptive terms in their classifications; it only means that there is no universal standard that all communities or all planning applications can adopt like there is for referential uses. So for "open space", local applications should pick the appropriate set of categories from the referential classifications to define the use.