Reality and warnings

The best part about graduate school is it is full of theory and false hopes. You leave grad school thinking you are going to get a job and plan an amazing city full of architecture and "urbanization". If you create a good plan the developers will just plug in and play. This does not happen. Politics will beat that collage crap out of you head. You will spend half of your time processing fence variations and setback requests. The other half of the time you will argue with developers over every nickel and dime. Then the developer will ultimately bypass you on the way to the mayor and threaten to pull the project. When the development is finally approved you will not even want to take credit for being a part of it. You will do all of this for average pay while your municipalities hold "great benefits" over your head. By the way those "great benefits" are falling by the waste side. So my advise would be to just be a "Yes Man" to whatever the elected officials want. If not you will find many headaches and arguments that might ultimately get you fired. Not to be a downer, but this is the reality in most municipal planning.

I don't really understand a lot of the comments here. The Urban Planning field isn't special. Virtually any job in the knowledge economy comes with its very own load of political baggage. This is true whether you're a city planner, an engineer at GE, or a manager at the local grocery store.

Working with other people means playing politics to some extent. Human beings are political creatures by nature, and while decisions should be made based solely on merit and sound factual information, we all know that self-interest, ego, and emotion will inevitably poke its noise in.

Learning to play the game while not losing your ideals or motivation in the process is part of life and it's a skill you'll need in almost any job worth having. Anyone thinking of avoiding or leaving planning due to the political downsides will likely be in for a rude awakening when they find out that the next job they take is just as politically challenging, even if in a different way.

Remember, there is no limit to what you can accomplish if you are willing to let other people take the credit (elected officials). Not sure how you teach somebody “adaptability” in college, but that is the most important skill a planner possesses. As things change (and they will), you need to respond accordingly. Rigid, type-A, uncompromising people (think Engineers) don’t generally do very well in the Planning world. I agree that in the beginning a planner should concentrate on listening and learning from their work environment. As you grow in your career and people gain confidence in your abilities, they will start to listen. If you truly care about doing “good” (which is why we all got into this profession right?) you must be willing to give others the credit sometimes. At least that’s my experience.

Sadly, one of the things not mentioned here is using your voice. Planners do have voices you know, it's not all about stamping approval. Maybe it's time planners actually recover from all the negative feedback we get when freeways get built and actually start talking about creating good projects.

It's not all about politics. It's not all about money. Think about what got you into this profession, and you should have your answers.

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- preserverence is the way of the uneducated

I see where this is comming from, even though more times than not planning practices seems to butt heads with urban politics, it is not fair to say that these two forces should always be seen as dichotomicaly opposing each other. I am going to sugest that urban politics and urban planning share a very uniquie relationship. It might be bennificial to look at the relationship as maybe symbiotic in nature, in that while differing in theories and agendas, in most cases planning needs politics to survive.

Just as a disclaimer, this is all just info that I have learned being involved in planning agencies, economic development, and city politics in a city like Charlotte, NC. I know that Charlotte is not the same as every other city, it just serves as the basis for my discussion.

How does planning need politics to survive, what exatcly do I mean by that? For instance, while planners may come up with many theories and practices to implement in real-world situations, without the backing of city council members, civic leaders, and community stakeholders, their plans and practices will not turn into reality. And while it might be true to say that community planners work on the community's agenda, they can still use politics to advise civic leaders and and citizens on the best way to implement the community's plans with town meetings, holding workshops and charrettes. While planners are actively trying to sell their ideas to the community, they need to be aware of the community's expectations as well as other prominent forces such as developers and market forces, which is why planners need to have a muli-disciplinary education and background so they can look at implementing community plans with a mult-faceted approach.

This brings up another topic between developers and planners. While most developers are more inclined to care about their bottom line and their potiential profit, and most planners(depending on their concentration) might care more about the actual land use and sustainablity of a site that the potential money to be made it is clear that there is a distinct and more times that not, a more pronounced rift between these two different but equally important disciplines.

Planners need to understand that while that making sure that a new development is LEED certified might make it more sustainable in the long run, if all of these sustainable features costs so much that it means cutting the number of housing or office units in half or decreasing the size of each unit, that it just is not economically benificial. While the statement in the original post that economic development takes a higher priority in most cities than sustainablity issues and other planning practices is for the most part true(depends on which city you are talking about)there are ways in which this can be surmounted. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that economic development is a vital force in comprohensive good of the city, there needs to be a mixture of development and good planning practices in the city, even a point or line that says for every new major development, a certain amount of sustainability or better planning guidelines has to be met. With the guidence of community planners, commmunities can request or mandate what I have said above, the unfortunate fact is that hardly any community has the balls to implement ploicies with any real teeth, and instead of a mandate, it is usally a feable request that goes for the mostpart unheard by the developers.

I guess the whole point to this rambiling is just help aspiring planners escape from their morose mood when they begin to realize that most of the planning ideology they have been force-fed is not applicable in the real world. Just don't worry, with the help of politics, you can still save the world, or at least your little piece of it.