A Very Early Start For A Career In Planning

17 January 2007 - 5:00am

A innovative program for gifted children in Australia is giving students a chance to learn the basics of town planning.

"Like many a dedicated urban planner, Luke Walker could not stop thinking about his work even after he had retired for the evening.

So he built a monorail from his bed, with straws and aluminium foil. The gifted seven-year-old is one of 13 budding town planners in the University of NSW's Small Poppies program, where children as young as four begin preliminary studies for careers in urban planning, forensics, philosophy and cryptology.

The number of participants in the holiday program for gifted and talented children has almost doubled among those aged four to seven-year-olds since July."

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, January 17, 2007
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Planners, architects, artists, and other community members can make the exploratory walk a key tool in re-making places, stemming from the emotions and atmospheres perceived by people who live there or visit them, and plan outward from the experiential, toward trajectories, shapes, and physical structures.