The Most Popular Planetizen Posts of 2016

No Electoral College needed: these were the most popular Planetizen posts from the year 2016.

3 minute read

December 19, 2016, 2:00 PM PST

By James Brasuell

To introduce the most popular posts of 2015, I wrote the following paragraph, anticipating, but still underestimating, the rare position we would find ourselves in at the end of 2016.

By this time next year, the United States will have a new president-elect, and much of the country will be deeply preoccupied with thoughts about the future. Last year at this time, the country was embroiled in strife with long roots in histories of poverty and racism. It was impossible to avoid the consequences of the past. Of course, similar points could be made about any number of years, since time immemorial.

Nostalgia is one of the most popular terms getting thrown around at the end of 2016 to describe the current political and cultural era, but that's not what I'm going for here. There are, undeniably, many people excited about the prospect of returning to some previous version of the world, as the machinations of Brexit, President-elect Trump, or the looming election in France show. There are also many people who think nostalgia doesn't explain a world rushing so quickly away from the exuberance that ushered in the Obama Administration.

I don't share those words from 2015 in a desire to erase 2016, but rather from a desire to prepare us all for 2017.

Planners can't avoid the consequences of geo-politics—in fact, the fingerprints of the profession can be found all over the country's current political and economic environment. There will be opportunities in 2017 (and 2018 and 2019 and 2020) for communities to decide whether planning should be an instrument for overturning the status quo or for preserving it. Hopefully planners will succeed in establishing a middle ground on that spectrum. Hopefully planners can lead in the hard work of crafting compromises that has proven too difficult for the political parties running the country, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

Donald Trump's name is found infrequently in the lists that follow, which might come as a welcome respite from the mainstream news stories that dominated 2016. Yes, the news cycle of land use and planning differs greatly from the news cycle of presidential politics, but we don't suggest the stories in this list to facilitate even the slightest hint of nihilistic escapism from 2016. There were a great many stories, ideas, and places that required our attention in 2016. We must consider and reconsider them, deeply and carefully, before we decide what to do with 2017.

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

Mary G., Urban Planner

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