To succeed, communities will need to rise above parochial concerns and interests, and consider the interests and concerns of neighboring communities. The advantage of a cooperative planning process is that it may enable adjoining local governments to avoid costly litigation arising from land use disputes. Cooperative land use planning may also cost less than if each local government were to hire its own consultant to prepare its own separate plan. Moreover, the data collected for one community may be equally informative to an adjacent community because the growth and market pressures affecting adjacent communities are often quite similar. Cooperative planning makes particularly good sense in cases where an incorporated village or city is completely surrounded by a single town.
Cooperative planning can also make sense for groups of towns.