Urban Planning

With the summer coming to a close new students are making their way to graduate planning programs. For those thinking about applying for 2008 it is time to start preparing. The deadlines can be as early as December, now only a few months away. These tips, based on my experiences on several admissions committees, can help you make sense of the application process.

What Admissions Committees Look For

Planning schools consider up to six different elements in admissions to masters programs: letters of intent, experience in activities related to planning (paid and volunteer work, internships, and activism), letters of reference, previous grades, GREs, and work samples.

I’m not basing this quick observation on any specific historical research or book, so bear with me. Cities grow and shrink; in effect they change rapidly (although sometimes it doesn’t seem rapidly enough and at other times all too rapidly). Where we operate in that continuum I think shapes much of how we see our role as professionals. Planning to address either shrinking cities or growing ones can seem, at times, like totally different professions. A colleague of mine remarked that planning for shrinking cities is definitely a niche market. With so much discussion surrounding growth and how we grow, there is much less dialog that defines the opposite.

In its most forward attempt to ensnare the fabled “discretionary rider,” my local transit agency recently set out handsome billboards touting the pleasures of the bus and the miseries of driving alone. They employed pithy admonishments and graphics such as a hand cuffed to a gas pump and a merry executive knitting and purling his way to the office.

For as often as the Gulf Coast and 9/11 debacles and their aftermaths have been analyzed, one discussion has been conspicuously missing: how starkly those events, natural and man-made, revealed the inability of planning today--however professionally designed, organized and regulated—to contend with the vagaries of circumstances and conditions out of its control.

This is my first blog post on this network and I'm happy to be here. For 1.5 years, I've been blogging by myself at greeneconomics.blogspot.com and this is the first time that I've been a "team" player. I'm hoping that debates and discussions on important policy issues take place here and I'll try to do my part to not be boring!