Contributor Blog

This morning I embarked with three dozen volunteers to plant 10 trees in Pigeon Town, a neighborhood in western New Orleans. The group was completing an eight-hour training on urban greening initiatives, learning everything from pruning methods to how to work with municipalities to find funding for beautification projects—which have been proven to improve everything from real estate values to crime statistics.

The training did not, however, cover what we were supposed to do when we heard gunshots ring out. That we had to improvise.

To hear my mother tell it, I gave Joe Biden the idea for high-speed rail. Charitable and glowing, yes, but isn’t that what mothers are for? 

All the same, I can’t help but glow a bit anyway when I think about how far we’ve come as a country in embracing high-speed rail. 

Tomorrow morning, I'll don a long black robe, a funny-looking hat and an atrocious brown hood to cap off an adventuresome journey through planning school. Almost two years ago, I decided to leave a healthy career in journalism to enter a field that, by contrast, might still have careers a decade from now. It's been 21 months of angst, overwork, undersleep, and hours-long battles with American FactFinder. And it's been completely, totally worth it.

Here are a few of the best lessons learned from two hard-fought years of planning education.

These days, I have more in common with my nephew Sam than just about anyone else. He just turned 3.

Sam is a train fanatic. Sure, he loves the children’s classics—Thomas the Tank Engine, the Polar Express—but he can also tell you about the Eurostar and the Shinkansen. His recent first ride on Amtrak was like his locomotive bar mitzvah: Today, I am a passenger.

I’ve spent all semester working on a studio project making the case for true high-speed rail in the Northeast megaregion. I picked the studio because, like Sam, I’m thrilled by trains, but an added perk is that every time I come with some new picture or factoid about the big, fast choo-choos, I move up a notch in the running for Uncle of the Year.

“Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter: -isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism; he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.’ A good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off of people.”

—Ferris Bueller

My classmate was up in front of everyone, flapping and flailing, pleading his case and getting shot down at every turn. It was a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

It was also kind of like looking in the mirror.

I’m just more than halfway through a planning school studio project working on the beautiful (no, really) Lower Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. They’ve teamed up about 15 planner/urban designers with about 45 landscape architects, who, as I mentioned last time, are reasonably bonkers. That was about a month and a half ago; since then, I’ve begun to think maybe I’m the one needing a room with padded walls.

Forgive me Olmsted, for I have sinned. I have strayed. I have coveted. I have had doubts.

I have thought about kicking urban design to the curb like a mangy puppy.

It’s Thursday! Sounds like a perfect day to quit your job.

Stuck in the doldrums of office work? Itching to get outside as summer rolls around and the blue skies start looking more and more appealing? There’s never been a better time to pack up and leave, planners. Do it. Quit today.

Last week marked the end of my first year of planning school. It’s been by turns enlightening, angst-ridden, sleep-deprived, soul-baringly revelatory, stimulating and intellectually crushing.

The bulk of the second semester is occupied by a first-year workshop—kind of a studio with training wheels—in which groups are assigned a client for whom they do a site analysis, come up with alternative solutions and then suggest a final plan and way to implement that plan. You know, kind of like in the real world.

And, like in the real world, sometimes folks don’t always get along as well as they should.

With just two weeks to go in my second semester, I like to think that I know just about everything about being a planning student by now. But when 100+ prospective students came to our campus open house last week, an easy question stumped me:

“What about drawing?”

At first I thought she was asking if she needed to have an art background coming into school. A thousand times, no. But instead she was looking to learn how to draw as a planner, which is a much trickier proposition.

There’s just one problem with academia. Sometimes it can be so … academic.

In the interest of getting out into the world, I’m writing this post from Nawlins (nee New Orleans), where 16 other Penn planners and I are spending our weeklong spring break doffing our tops for beads and booze doing pro bono city planning work. For most of us, it’s been nothing short of a paradigm shift—and the week ain’t over yet.

From the first day of the semester, I could tell my Urban Design Methods course was going to be different from the others I've taken in planning school so far.

“Call me at home. I’m up till midnight,” the professor told us. I’m not up till midnight.

He asks us questions like, “What is your design identity?” “What three adjectives describe you as a designer?” “Who are you?” It makes grad school feel kind of like therapy. Really, really expensive therapy.

The second semester in planning school at Penn is defined by a major project in which students are broken into groups, given a problem region, and tasked with, in the space of three months, coming up with a plan comparable to what professionals do in 12 to 18 months. Over those three months, the students get intimate with their designated locale, exploring every nook, cranny and underused land parcel.

Helloooooooooo, Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

There’s an old John Gorka song called “I’m From New Jersey.” It goes, “I’m from New Jersey/ It’s like Ohio/ But even more so/ Imagine that.” I’d bet good green cash he was driving down Route 70 when he wrote that.

On Friday, in the first week of my second semester of planning graduate school, we did the hokey-pokey. We put our right foot in, put our right foot out, put our right foot in, and then we shook it all about. We turned ourselves around. That was what it was all about.

The demonstration was all about pointing out common ground and how people were rooted in order to approach problem solving and conflict resolution. It sounds a little squishy, I know. But it got the point across, and more important, it introduced the dance to one international student who had never heard of the hokey-pokey.

Four months, thousands of pages and $60 worth of printing later, my first semester of planning school is over.

Really? That’s it?

Not that I was understimulated. Plenty of big assignments kept me up later than my girlfriend would’ve liked. But in the working world, four months isn’t that long—it’s a big project, a new initiative. In grad school, apparently, it’s reason enough to take a month off.

So without any further ado, a few highlights and lowlights from the first semester. Not too many lowlights, though. A few of my professors read this blog.

Most of the time it’s not that hard to kind of forget that I’m a grad student. It often feels like a long, ongoing conference, but without nametags: We hear speakers (sometimes known as professors), have long lunch breaks, do exercises, then retire to the bar at night to talk about all of it.

More similarities: None of our classrooms would be mistaken for hotel conference centers, but a bunch of them are windowless and characterless. People are cordial, but also kind of angling for a job. Everybody’s friendly, and sometimes, people hook up.

Then reality comes crashing down like a pile of books: oh yeah. Exams. We have to take those.

Hey, have you heard we’re all screwed?

Last week Penn hosted the “Reimagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil” conference. If you were there, or if you read the liveblog of the event, you saw speaker after speaker tell of the doom and gloom facing the planet. Climate change! Carbon emissions! Decaying infrastructure! Nine billion people! In the words of the classical philosopher Shawn Carter, we got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one.

Frankly, it’s all a little depressing.

The following post will likely result in the revocation of my Philadelphia residency.

It’s heretical to say, especially on a day when the city is on fire (not literally; okay, mostly not literally) with excitement. But the city planner in me almost wishes the Phillies hadn’t won last night.

Of course I wanted them to win the World Series. Twenty-five years is a long time for any city—let alone a four-sport city—to wait for a championship, and it’s definitely Philadelphia’s time. I’m thrilled to pieces they pulled it out.

The answer is: “Because people today would rather not work and instead just sit at home collecting welfare checks.”

And the question? If you guessed, “What should you not say in a room full of city planning students?”, congratulations! You win. We would have also accepted, “FDR began a ton of new federal programs during the New Deal. As long as we have a $700 billion financial bailout, what programs would you enact or not enact as part of a New Deal today?” Thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

Almost a month into planning school, I can see the profession’s all about improvisation. How do you think on your feet when a client doesn’t like your design? What other cities can you turn to when a sudden mandate comes down to look for policy innovation?

Or let’s say you’re a planning professor. The financial markets have started a tailspin, eating themselves alive and swallowing MBAs whole. How’s your lesson plan gonna change?