Effective Urban Planning in 10 Simple Steps
Get EUP come on get down with the sickness.
Welcome to this ~*newish*~ section built mainly for younger Exasperated readers and earlier-career people. Every so often, I’ll have a thought and put it here in an easily digestible form. I’d ask that you share this with friends or colleagues who might benefit from some hard-won thoughts and examples as I enter year 15 of my career.
The goal is to make this entire section practical. I’m going to mostly stick to listicles here because these are the quickest way to get these hitters out. Bing bong.
If you have questions, you should send me an email at samuel [dot] b [dot] sklar [at] gmail [dot] come, and I’ll do my best to answer. Share this with a young planner in your life for ~*fun*~.
Ten Ways to Become an Effective Urban Planner
I’m not defining it. Here we go.
1. Going to planning school is not a decision to be taken lightly. At all.
There’s a lingering question that all 21-26-year-olds interested in the built environment have: Should I go to planning school? There’s a flow chart I’ll make for a later date, but the question flow is: if yes, where and why? If so, where, for how long? There is a meaningful, academic difference between planning, design, engineering, policy, comms, law, and social impact. No matter how hard you think about this there is a very good chance you get it wrong anyway.
2. This field is the ultimate liberal arts degree. You will be a lifelong learner.
You must understand that you can be good at your niche—housing, transportation, landscape, architecture, urban design, community and economic development—and you’ll never be good at this job if you don’t also have at least a cursory understanding of the others you’ve ignored. Didn’t like math in college? Tough. That’s your ceiling. Not great at drawing or design? Dive into the history and the art direction side. The stories we’re required to tell run very wide and very deep.
3. Develop very deep, core values. Stick to them.
I won’t tell you what mine are, because you have to make these and earn these as part of your development as a professional, and, not for nothing, as an empathetic human. You can’t approach each project and each neighborhood as though you’re seeing problems for the first time. Bring your whole self to a place, and your stakeholders, the real people you’re helping, will help you define problems better to apply interventions more clearly. This does have a downside of not being able to shut it off. Maybe this field isn’t for you.
4. Also develop domain expertise and/or some level of people skills. Yes, even you, engineers.
You see, (2) isn’t enough. At the beginning of your career, no one is going to believe you know what you’re doing, and you can’t be 27 and setting yourself up as a super generalist if no one knows that but you. So pick something—GIS, design software, transportation planning—and dive all the way in as far as you think you can. You can come up later if you’d like and expand outward (management), or you can reach the depths (individual contributions). Specializing does not absolve you from communication requirements.
5. Bring a reasoned point of view to your work. There is no atonal planning.
One pitfall I continue to see with younger planners is a decisive lack of perspective right as they’re leaving school. This makes sense—academic planning is very different than on-the-ground planning and it can take time and experience to shed the ideology of what logic, data, and information say is “correct” and realize what is correct for the right context. That margin is your point of view.
6. As a corollary to (5), understanding the local politics and its history will help you make better decisions.
Knowing how local decisions are made (politically) will only help shape any interventions you suggest or how you tell certain stories (narratively). Even if you think a project is relatively routine, I promise you it is not, and seeking this knowledge from local experts will only endear you to them and loosen likely acceptance of (good) ideas. There’s always the question of where do you, a city planner, sit during a planning process. Do you plan from within your organization as an advisor?
7. It is OK and likely preferred as you enter decade two of this long career that you bop among the private, public, and non-profit sectors.
Not every career decision will make full or even partial sense until the end of your career, but I will advise you to look to the people over the place. Rarely will you notice a firm/agency’s “culture” outside your immediate team, and anti-labor policies that come every now and again from management. You, too, will have to shape dynamics and decide labor policy if and when you grow into leadership over time.
There are significant differences among the private, public, and non-profit sectors, and each has its place in your career development. Frankly, I’d rather hire someone with a sorta bonkers journey than a Planner I > Planner II > Associate Director journey. You’ve not seen enough, and I’m mostly already bored.
8. Show up to stuff even when you’re tired as all hell, but don’t burn out.
Ninety percent of relationship building is showing up again and again. Being in the same room as the people you’d like to work with or for is exceptionally important. It’s not “networking,” which sucks. Eventually, you develop a reputation, and what you do with it is up to you. It takes years to build and a second to break.
9. Our industry, especially transportation, is full of counterintuitive ideas—you’ll have to learn with cognitive dissonance.
This counterintuitiveness, e.g., just one more lane bro makes messaging extremely challenging, which makes decision-making even harder, which makes good decision-making even harder, which makes getting anything built in a timely or effective manner nearly impossible. Your job is to find a way to cut through the noise. You may train for a long time before your messaging gets through, to make an impact. Don’t give up.
10. Ask for help when you need it, but don’t be an annoying tryhard.
All the people you look up to in our industry were once where you are (and I am) now, and certainly didn’t get to positions of (relative) power by luck (on its own) or by working hard (by themselves). Reach out to people (politely and respectfully of their time and limit bandwidth) and ask for something small. Then do the 9 other things on the list a lot. You’ll get there.
Incredibly valuable insights especially point 6 about undertanding local political history. In my experience working on a mid-sized transit project, we spent months designing a technically perfect solution only to have it get torpedoed in week one of community meetings becuase we missed a decades-old zoning battle. The time spent learning from local advocates beforehand would have saved us months of rework and actually built real trust with the community.