Contributor Blog

Some time ago I noted a number of terrific image resources for urban planners. This blog highlights some additional sources.

With vacations upon us many students have been asking me what they should read over the winter break. Certainly it is possible to catch up with planning classics and thought provoking books and several earlier blogs have highlighted these options. However, for those wanting to escape and learn something as well, a number of mystery writers write books that both investigate crimes and evoke a sense of place. The following list highlights just some of this range—there are hundreds more of course (and if you scroll for the bottom you will find links to other lists).

The short answer to the question about whether someone needs professional or activist planning experience before graduate school is yes! You will have a clearer sense of the important questions you have about planning and your peers will have more to learn from your experiences. For this reason admissions committees favor students who have some employment and/or activist history. (With a few years of work experience you'll also likely have more money, which is handy in terms of paying for things like heat).

Confused about where to study planning? Of course there’s the Planetizen guide but in the United States two free sources of information provide extensive lists of potential schools.

The fall is high season for school visits from prospective students. I am a great believer in doing this remotely—while some greenhouse gases are generated by a Google search it is far less than a plane ride to a distant campus. I suggest visiting schools only after you have been admitted (and not even then if you don’t have a really crucial question that can only be answered on site). However, if you can’t bring yourself to even apply to a school in a place you’ve never visited, and promise to buy carbon set asides, a tour may be worth it. The following tips can help you make the most of the school.

With the semester starting, students are beginning to focus on assignments and other project work. Today there is a great deal of information available for planners, but that can lead students to be overwhelmed (and use only a few available sources) or uncertain about how to use those sources that are available. Fortunately universities are coming up with resources to help students untangle these issues. My own institution just launched the very helpful http://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu/. The following tips are adapted from my guide for students doing final projects and theses (link at the end of this entry).

Summer is the time to start thinking about graduate school applications typically due in the late fall and early spring. Previous blogs have looked at how to investigate if planning is for you, find the right program, apply, and decide which offer to take up. This blog looks in more detail at the statement of purpose or letter of intent, an important part of the application packet. The following tips will help you craft a compelling statement:

In recent months many planning students have graduated and are moving on to the next phase of life—jobs, internships, fellowships, and such. For many this will involve a move to a new place. Even those staying in the same metropolitan area will seldom make it back to their planning program, and besides their fellow students will have scattered. Graduate school provides a peer group of those with similar interests and training. How do recent graduates create such a network when they are no longer in residence at a university?

For many students graduate school is the time to learn how to write professional reports and memos. One of the skills many planning students seem eager to master is writing the content-free document. This kind of writing is a little tricky to do. Accordingly, in this last blog in my series on planning skills I provide tips on how to create sentences, paragraphs, and whole reports and PowerPoint presentations that convey the absolute minimum of important information.

Titles

Titles should never reveal the actual content of the report. This is the guideline I find easiest to follow myself.

In the United States the stimulus package will eventually kick in to create jobs for planners—in housing, transportation, design and such. However, in upcoming months students graduating from planning schools face a situation they typically had not planned on—where unemployment is relatively high and employers are hesitant about taking on new people. As I have been pointing out to my students, this is not the first time in the history of the world that such a situation has occurred. The following tips draw on my own observations of successful strategies for weathering such downturns.

Not sure if you want to be a planner? Recently my colleagues and I have received a spate of emails from prospective students around the world wanting to know whether planning is a field they should pursue. Their extensive lists of questions show that this is a pressing issue for them. This entry answers some of the more common questions and aims to help prospective students come to programs with a shorter and more focused set of topics to explore.

Finding a first full-time “real” job in planning seems a daunting task at present. However, cities are growing, infrastructure is being funded, and there will be jobs for planners. The following tips can help one navigate the market.

Be prepared to go to Kansas. By this I mean that there are certain places much loved by young planners—New York, Boston, San Francisco—and these are not the best places to start looking for early planning jobs. Sure they have them. For low pay. Where you’ll find yourself at the very bottom of the totem pole with years of photocopying ahead of you before you make it to the zoning counter.

Two years ago the Planetizen editors asked me to contribute a monthly blog posting. The first one appeared in February 2007 and I have managed to submit posts monthly for two years. In accepting the assignment, I decided that I needed to have an angle. I write, teach, and practice about the substance of planning so I decided to do something else—provide advice for students on how to enter and succeed in planning programs. Martin Krieger at USC already provided a terrific advice column for doctoral students so I decided to focus on students in professional planning programs.

Terrorized by the literature is the title of a chapter of Howard Becker’s excellent book, Writing for Social Scientists (1986, Chicago). Whether through terror or misunderstanding, the literature review is one of the areas that students in planning find most confusing. While I have dealt with the literature review briefly in my blog on writing proposals, the tips below provide more detailed advice on how to compose a literature review and how to find important literature in the age of information overload. 

With the return to prominence of physical planning and increasing use of GIS, planning students are becoming interested in developing portfolios of their work. This blog entry provides tips for this process exploring why portfolios are useful, who they are aimed at, and how to design the portfolio. It provides many of the resources needed to design your own!

Recently I’ve been writing about skills that planners need—the findings from surveys of employers and the key role or writing in the planning skill set. Skills like writing, graphics, data analysis, and the ability to listen are obviously important. As Ethan Seltzer and Connie Ozawa’s 2002 survey found, however, several more general skills are also key. I reported these in an earlier blog and they include: working well with the public and with colleagues, being a self-starter, being able to finish work on time and on budget, and understanding public needs.

What do planners do? Last month I highlighted the findings of several surveys of planners aiming to identify core skills for the workplace. They highlight the importance of skills in communication, information analysis and synthesis, political savvy, and basic workplace competencies and attitudes. In all these surveys, however, the ability to write well is at or near the top.

At the beginning of semester students are signing up for classes and planning their degrees. Lately, a question I have been asked quite frequently is which classes will make new planners most employable? Students ask if computer aided design or GIS will be key. However, surveys of planning practitioners show that a far more basic set of skills is important—skills in communication, information analysis and synthesis, political savvy, and basic workplace competencies and attitudes.

Below, I highlight three of these studies from across three decades:

Visual communication is becoming more sophisticated in planning, however many online image sources are restricted and require payment for use. Others, such as flikr.com and Google Images are extremely useful but have uneven quality and information provided about the images can be difficult to assess. While flckr.com and Google Images will remain a key resource, a number of other online image databases provide more consistent metadata along with free access.

Last month’s blog outlined how to find books recommended by many planners—important, classic, or accessible.

However, summer is also a time to push your viewpoint a bit further. For those wanting readings that might push you to think differently about planning, the following lists are useful starting points. (And a note to planners—we need more of these lists reflecting different places and people and issues!)