Hi all,

I'll start with some background about why I'm asking!

I'm a senior in Statistics at a large state university. I love my major and find myself quite competent at it. However, my career goals haven't gone quite as planned. I was dead-set on being an actuary & passed 2 exams and managed to land an internship.

I hated every second of it, doing grunt work completely unrelated to my studies or anywhere near what I thought an actuary did. I don't see myself taking multiple years of exams on top of full time employment to have the *chance* at doing something interesting, let alone the fact that my work funnels directly toward institutions whose sole purpose nowadays is to drain regular people dry. It just seemed like my bosses hated their work and had the life sucked out of them, too.

That being said, I thought I'd look into my high school interest of urban planning! I want to keep doing quantitative work with my statistics knowledge, and wanted to know how that fits into this field and what I could do to look into jobs and further my career in that respect. I thought I'd also ask about what excites planners and what they most like to do out of everything on their plate!

Side note: I had never considered grad school given that it's not at all required of actuaries, so what should I do to apply to a planning school and how can I research planning programs?

Asking because when I say that I’m studying it, people have no idea what that means!

My town is discussing turning a failing business plaza into a housing complex. But a lot of people are against it because they say it would require new police; firefighters; school budget; roads; etc. And that the property taxes wouldn’t be enough.

How valid is an argument like this? Is new housing still worth it if you need so much new infrastructure and public services? How do struggling, cash strapped municipalities pay for it all? It feels instinctively to me like a NIMBY argument but it also has a valid point.

Hi,

Recently I posted here asking if we will ever go back to grid-style suburbs, and I got a lot of answers. It made me think of another question regarding why cities dont just do what they used to do and take it upon themselves to create new walkable streets. It confuses me why they often just leave it up to developers to build on the outskirts of town when there is plenty of empty land closer to the city center that towns could purchase and plat out themselves. Even the more YIMBY/Pro walkability and density municipalities seem to leave the design of new road networks up to the private sector. Why is this, and are there any current examples of cities creating new grids themselves? I hope this isnt a dumb question.

EDIT: Im referring to the US!

I’m reflecting back on my grad school years when Florida’s “creative class concept” was all the rage. It was often paired with an explosion of interest in New Urbanism.

A few things come to mind:

Many cities in my part of the South took this advice to invest in their downtown areas. Instead of organic neighborhoods, they became boutique districts filled with coffee shops and record stores and high end galleries. In a way some of them feel as lifeless as when they were abandoned. They always framed it as “investment in downtown will spread to the poor neighborhoods.” It never do.

My master of science degree practically revolved around some of these ideas and a few years later everyone is just like, yep that was silly, next! No sense of a real reckoning w the error. Or an apology to the students! It’s like Florida made his bag and split.

Just the whole concept that community is built by high income transplants and not families, culture, tradition, is just like. Wow.

Idk.

/rant

I am an American expat in France, and one of the huge strengths I have noticed in French urbanism is the multi-scalar approach to urban and regional planning that allows for- or requires- cooperation between municipalities. Based off of what I remember seeing back home, this sort of cooperation is often weak to nonexistent in the states save for statewide legislature that forces cities' hands.

One simple example is if one US town is bike-friendly, but the neighbors are bike-hostile (as is the case near my hometown), you end up with bike lanes dumping any bikers into the parking lane once they reach the town line. In France, the organization of powers means that bike lane projects would be handled on an intermunicipal level, thus avoiding this kind of problem and ensuring continuity on a number of problems. Particularly, natural threats such as floods and droughts that don't give a fuck about administrative boundaries are handled on the relevant natural boundary, ensuring that one city's flood protections doesn't simply displace the problem elsewhere, etc. Only smaller, local-scale issues are handled by municipal urban planners.

It absolutely has its pros (including for municipal budgets), but plenty of mayors and inhabitants felt that their voice on local issues, as well as their power and agency to address them, was often lost in the noise of the metropole, and misalignment between the two levels of planning was a source of friction.

I'd be interested to hear from some US-based planners- what does intermunicipal cooperation really look like in your region? What benefits and tensions are created through this cooperation or lack thereof?

This is something I've been thinking about for a while, partly from attending these meetings in the Boston area over the years. There's a real effort put into outreach: the notices go out, the room fills up, people share genuine concerns about traffic, green space, density. And then the project moves forward more or less as originally proposed.

I'm not saying the process is dishonest. Planners are often working within constraints the public doesn't fully see. But there's a gap between what residents believe their input is doing and what it's actually doing, and that gap erodes trust over time.

The people who do show up tend to be homeowners with time and stability, which means certain voices get heard a lot and others almost never do. Renters, younger residents, people working two jobs - they're not at the Tuesday night meeting.

I'm curious how planners in this community think about this. Is there a format that works better for reaching a broader crosssection? And do the comments from public hearings carry real weight in how projects get shaped, or is that mostly determined upstream?

I'm not even sure why I took this interview. My entire specialty is comprehensive planning/long range planning, which I am interviewing for elsewhere but I also applied to a zoning office in a city id really like to live in and now I have to think up reasons as to why I would actually want to work there with an urban planning degree.

I know that people move around often, but I've been taught for 4 years to see zoning maintenance as the absolute bottom of drudgery and beyond what I am even capable of offering. I don't know how I am supposed to bullshit interest in this position other than my interest in actual planning, but I know others who have gone from zoning assistance to full planner roles.

Am I supposed to have the zoning code fully memorized beforehand? How much are they actually expecting of me from the start??? I feel so lost and honestly I'm not expecting this job, not for a lack of interest but just because its such a mismatch between what actual planners can do and what is done daily.

I'm looking for stuff that's analysis of the work at all levels, departments, councils, heads, funding, committees. Not urban planning material so much, apologies about that if needed. But I asked this question in /r/suggestmeabook and someone said to ask around here anyway - what I'm interested in is certainly fundamental to shaping the urban domain anyway.

Anything with personal anecdotes would be welcome as well. I'm just keen on learning more about how towns and cities operate. In a nutshell it'd be a nonfiction print straight up version of the TV show Parks and Recreation.

I'm a consultant for a small dense town that is located in a rural area. Thus public transit is non-existent and sidewalks and mulit-modal has not picked up. However, the town itself is densely developed and has numerous historic small lots.

The zoning ordinance is from the 90a and so the parking minimums are from that era. We have been working to modernize portions as we can and have the political capital too.

We have been running into issues where clearly the parking minimums are too high and we are needing variances for retail constantly. I believe I have the political push from the PC and the city to push for strong changes. My main plan of attack is to offer some solutions at tiered approaches to not shock the system.

1. Consider switching the minimums to maximums and let the market decide. Primarily for retail/commercial. Maybe set a base minimum.

Or

1. Consider modernizing the ratio to reflect the modern shopper behavior. Offer concessions for on street parking, bike or horse and buggy (strong Amish community) or shared parking agreements to further lower the requirements.

Or

1. Just try to modernize the ratios as is.

I'd like to do some form of 1 and 2 combined ideally. But, if the willpower is not there, does anyone have resources for newer ratios that work and can float to alleviate the pressure outside of just trial and error or business outreach?

Neckarbogen in Germany offers really cool insights into good urban planning in building new neighborhoods.

I currently work in an environment where it is obvious that the elected administration ultimately has no respect for the land use ordinances in place and does not support the land use department when push comes to shove. Basically, any constituent (particularly politically connected people or businesses) can get whatever they want approved if they raise enough of an issue. It’s never anything egregious enough to actually cause a negative impact on the community, but nonetheless still in violation of the current policy and setting a bad precedent. Our director is of no help whatsoever, and will blatantly undermine us to approve things or gloss over issues at the direction of elected administration. I can’t blame him for trying to keep his job secure, but it’s still frustrating.

Anyway just wondering if anyone else has/had a similar experience (or, hopefully, the complete opposite:)

I’m a public sector county-level planner (about 4ish years now) and still struggle with fully understanding drainage plans. I know enough to be able to read a site specific plan or the big picture for a subdivision plan, but not enough to answer more technical questions than can come up in public hearings.

Having to say “the county engineer signed off on it” or “I’d have to refer to the engineer on that” (who usually isn’t present) during hearings isn’t a great look even though it’s not exactly my purview.

Does anyone have any good resources for learning more drainage from a planning perspective? Anything from site specific to regional flow patterns? I’m in Florida if that helps at all.

Edit: okay I promise I have not, and will not, ever testify on drainage! The most I’ve said is whether they’ve submitted their permit to the local water management district or not.

That being said it is still a blank spot in my day-to-day so I was just hoping there was a good YouTube channel out there to conceptualize things better.

Hi! Ive been into urbanism for a while, and have been wondering what the future of american suburb planning will be. I have noticed that a lot of sprawly suburban streets (texas triangle) have gotten a bit more square and straight, but its still all been very detached from everything and theres nowhere to go unless you have a car. Are we doomed to an eternity of levittown and lennar-style sprawl or will we be correct ourselves and return to the grid style suburbs that we all know and love? sorry if this is a really dumb question :p

Hopefully this is the right flair!

I work in environmental planning and I handle a lot of the public notices coming out from our team about projects. I've been doing a lot of work on making our digital communications more accessible for people using screen readers but I'm kind of stumped on what to do with physical abutter notices. Obviously you can't make something accessible to screen readers that is not being read with a screen reader. What techniques have others used to try to get this information out to people with low vision? Large print text? QR codes linking to digital communications? QR Codes give me pause because some people struggle with technology and also if someone has no vision that doesn't work at all.

Trying again without the personal backstory.

Are there roles within urban planning/housing/community development that lean into historic research/preservation. Especially in cities with a long history of policy that impacts access to housing for marginalized groups? If so, what does that look like?

Climate adaptation is already happening. The question is whether we're adapting fast enough, strategically enough, and early enough.

The World Bank estimates that making infrastructure more resilient in low- and middle-income countries can produce about four dollars in benefits for every dollar invested. Yet developing countries may need between $310 billion and $365 billion a year for climate adaptation by 2035, against international public adaptation finance of just $26 billion in 2023.

Prevention can pay. But resources are finite, and not everything can be protected equally, which makes adaptation ultimately a question of priorities.

In the United States, unmitigated properties with repeated flood losses represent about 2.5% of policies in the federal flood insurance program, yet properties with two or more losses have accounted for 48% of claims by dollar value. At some point, the calculation changes: rebuild again, spend more to protect the property, or pay the owner to leave. Since 1989, FEMA has acquired almost 70,000 properties as flood-risk mitigation.

New Zealand faced the same question. After severe flooding and Cyclone Gabrielle, Auckland classified more than a thousand homes as places where risk to life was intolerable and practical mitigation wasn't possible. Hundreds have since been bought by the government. This is managed retreat.

Humans have always adapted. The harder question is whether we can afford to wait until destruction forces the decision.

Many adaptation tools already exist. The difficult part is deciding where to use them first. Expected losses avoided per dollar spent could be one way to prioritize, but it can't be the only one. A spreadsheet cannot tell us what a historic neighborhood is worth, whether a poorer community deserves less protection than an expensive waterfront, or what happens when relocation breaks apart an established community.

Efficiency matters. So does fairness.

Governments routinely mobilize enormous resources after catastrophes, and some mechanisms already commit part of that capacity before disaster strikes. If prevention can save money, perhaps part of the problem isn't simply how much money exists. It's when we become willing to spend it.

As risk rises, insurance can become more expensive or unavailable, mortgages harder to obtain, property values unstable, and investment may move elsewhere. A place doesn't have to disappear beneath the water to become difficult to inhabit. It can become economically uninhabitable first. And wealth affects who can respond: a rich community may finance protection that a poorer community facing the same physical risk cannot.

The hazard may be shared.

The ability to escape it isn't.

Some places will be protected. Others will be redesigned. Some people will move. Some communities may receive too little, too late. These decisions will be made one way or another. The danger is that disasters, markets and unequal wealth end up making too many of them by default.

For those working in planning: when several communities face genuine risks and resources cannot cover everything, what criteria should determine where adaptation investment goes first?

In terms of reflectivity of infrastructure, shading and materials used.