Wanted to create a fun thought provoking discussion. If we handed the reigns completely over to Ai and robots for construction what do you think our cities would look like? I’m assuming cities would develop extremely fast. But what would they look like?

By handing over the reign, effectively permitting would be gone and any sort of delays in building would also be gone as well.

I’m currently a public sector planner working in a mid-size city, specializing in long-range planning. I have over ten years experience in government and nonprofit CDC’s. Thinking about making a move to the private sector. If you’ve done this, what was it like? What’s the biggest difference in your daily work? Was it a good move for you overall? Any advice? Thanks!

Hey y’all! I work for a large municipality (~500k people) and we’re in the process of rewriting our land development code. We’ve scheduled and held a couple of preliminary public informational meetings but turnout has been low, and the number of people who have signed up for more information is in the single digits.

We want to reach a broader audience via advertising. We’ve already reached out to all of the local civic orgs. Going to try advertising in the library and potentially other governmental buildings. Don’t want to reach out to too many independent orgs/churches so that we don’t unintentionally skew turnout in any particular direction.

What are some other effective ways to get people at the table that we may be missing?

TIA!

Update 1: I did NOT expect this to blow up in our little corner of Reddit. I loved reading every comment. Just to add additional info:

• I have about 10 years of experience, so not the most junior but I don't give extreme senior energy yet.
• I'm a consultant at a firm so escalating to the city manager is not my hands, but my clients (i.e. the city) are great; they've escalated, brought in senior managers and have strategies to defuse bad situations.
• Having a third party moderator and facilitator is common practice for us as well.
• I have reported these incidents to my firm's HR but that was pretty fruitless, i'm not sure they're concerned with what goes on at public hearing for a client project (open to hearing others' experience on this).

Original Post:

As the title says, I get that public consultation is part of the job. But I used to get excited to go out to the public with new plans and talking to people who are excited about city building. But now I dread it. A little bit of tension is ok, and I used to find people pretty reasonable, but in my last few session, I encountered: verbally abusive people (literally, inches away from my face screaming and berating me), people who put their hands on members of my team (poking her in the chest to make a point), and racist and homophobic slurs written on comment cards (I'm a POC for what it's worth). I'm a 5'3" 130lb female who is a visible minority, and I'm tired of feeling like I need an entourage of white male coworkers just to do my job.

I get a surge of anxiety when I'm assigned to a project with public consultation scope, only to breath a sigh of relief when I find out the client wants virtual only. I've been "lucky" in that most of my projects are the fun ones where the proposal is generally something that the public usually likes or is neutral on.

I'm sure this has been posted several times in the past, but the stress is reaching a new high. Not sure what I'm looking for here - maybe just solidarity, some stories of your own experience with this, perhaps someone here has felt the same way and decided to change career paths? Thanks for reading if you got this far.

I'm so sick of the snout houses in and around my community. If zoning were not an issue, is there a way to effectively retrofit a covered porch or front yard pergola or something to 1) make them not as ugly, and 2) build an environment in which neighbors would hang out and get to know each other? I'd love to see some examples of what this could look like.

Hope everyone's doing well!

I (30M) am a current urban planning grad student specializing in transportation, and I'm thinking about attending TRB in D.C. this January. I can qualify for a $500 stipend from my school to cover the early-bird registration cost ($435).

I'm not too concerned about travel costs. I have enough hotel points to cover lodging for the week, and I need to use them, as they expire in March. I was also able to get a round-trip train ticket for about $100.

This is my first semester in the program, so admittedly, this would be a new experience for me. I wouldn't have much to offer in terms of insight or experience, but I figure this is the best time to go while I can keep the costs relatively low.

Any advice for networking, finding internship/career opportunities, or making the most of the conference would be greatly appreciated!

I've never even heard of them up until recently but there's a proposed development in my town and one of the objections the city engineer had to it was that it featured an "inefficient double cul-de-sac". Now from what I've been reading cul-de-sacs are usually considered an outdated design (if I understand correctly they're good for the people within the cul-de-sac but bad for the people living outside of it). So if a cul-de-sac is bad, would a double cul-de-sac be twice as bad?

Do you respond to direct questions during the public comment section of your meetings? I was taught to address it during miscellaneous business if I knew the answer.

I'm a city planner in a small city (pop ~20,000) and our department has been in the practice of allowing developers to enter into Public Improvements Agreements (PIAs) that establish timelines for building required public improvements after recording the final plat.

We don't have the most tenured team so we're a little fuzzy on the details of how this became standard practice in our city, but we've been told by those in the local developer community that this practice of recording the final plat first gives them better financial positioning to generate the necessary capital to build the improvements. However, this places a big administrative burden on staff to manage all of these various agreements, and we've learned that, in practice, we (the city) will realistically never pull the bond (or other financial guarantee) to build the improvements ourself due to the operational headache this would present, so it has potential for big issues to arise if developers hit snags along the way that prevent them from making good on the approved plans.

We're now considering changing our practice to require developers to build all required public improvements before recording the final subdivision plat. We've seen evidence that this is pretty standard in most places, and certainly makes logical sense from an order of operations perspective, but we expect that this would generate a lot of complaints from our local developer community.

So I was just curious if any folks here with more experience and familiarity with development financing mechanisms could shed any light on this? Do developers gain significant financial advantages by being allowed to defer construction of public improvements until after recording final plat? If so, do these developer-friendly benefits outweigh the administrative cost to staff and added difficulty/headaches? Should we just get on-board with how it seems to be done elsewhere and require improvements to be build prior to final plat approval/recording?

I was hired at a large city two years ago to do long range planning for a very contentious project. I do not have a master's in planning and previously held two years of long range planning at an adjacent suburb. My previous role was 3 years of environmental consulting (this is an environmentally focused role) after getting my bachelors.

I basically am struggling with soft skill work. This is a very technical project and I feel like I am constantly behind on understanding our code and methodology while still trying to learn how different city codes tie in. Then there's the state and federal requirements. I also got recently diagnosed with ADHD and have had a hard time explaining the project to the public. My boss is harsh at critiquing and has lashed out a few times at me.

It's gotten so bad that I feel my confidence is at zero, I'm having panic attacks and just want to sit and cry every time I see a comment from him on my work. I feel like an imposter. Were a small team and I can't help but feel like a failure. He also treats me like I'm a kid at times (20 year age gap).

I feel like after two years I'm still not anywhere near where I should be in terms of bettering my project knowledge and I'm just a burden on my small team and my boss. I feel like they should have hired someone else who would have done a better job. I want to quit but I'm stuck in a lease and just adopted a cat and I feel stuck just feeling miserable.

I’m talking about anything from the history behind why a city is laid out a certain way, why a particular building looks the way it does, how a street or public space came to be, or some random but fascinating fact about how our built environment works.

Maybe it’s a historical decision that shaped an entire city, an unexpected reason behind a design feature, or something you noticed that made you see an ordinary place differently.

It doesn’t have to be technical or related to your specific profession. I’m just looking for those interesting little stories and insights that make you look at the world around you differently.

What’s something you learned that made you think, “That’s actually so cool, I never knew that!”?

Suppose that some sprawly US city, say Atlanta, decides to allow mixed use development and denser housing all throughout city limits. How long would it take for development to actually happen and make the city more sustainable?

To me, it feels like it would take so long, since (as an oversimplification) many landowners on a given block, say, would have to agree to sell their land which is a very difficult lift. Most examples of new mixed-use/pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods I hear about are from massive plots of vacant/formerly industrial land being repurposed, not residential neighborhoods naturally improving.

Every time I hear about a progressive zoning reform, it feels like it'll take so long to only put a dent into the issue. Like sure it's great that Massachusetts legalizes ADUs by right but that's increased the housing supply by 2,000 over 1.5 years. Is that a lot? I don't know.

Are there good case studies for this? e.g. cities that were early to remove some zoning restrictions, and what that has actually resulted in? I guess I've seen the graph of Minneapolis housing vs other midwest cities, but there's still a ton of single-family detached neighborhoods close to the center of the city.

I say yay. Brand new cities of nothing but publicly-funded buildings. Maybe the rents could be based on cost of building maintenance rather than incomes in order to keep them financially solvent.

Thoughts?

New York has Albany, Buffalo and other cities that it could invest into where people can move to for jobs. I go to PA a lot and the state has a lot of potential as well. I am sure there is a reason why things are the way they are but I have been having this thought for awhile now.

Hi all,

London based planner here with just shy of a decades experience. I am eager to move abroad and want to know if others have successfully moved and worked as a planner (without having had experience in that country). I've worked in consultancy and as the government and the Greater London Authority but fancy a few years abroad. Eager to hear about others experience in getting work/ securing job offers before a move. Essentially I am open to anywhere but I want to work in this field so I would like to hear about others experience in securing roles.

I am working towards chartership at present!

This monthly recurring post will help concentrate common questions around career and education advice.

The goal is to reduce the number of posts asking similar questions about Education or Career advice and to make the previous discussions more readily accessible.

Most posts about education, degree programs, changing jobs, careers, etc., will be removed so you might as well post them in here.

When I travel, I always look at how other places handle city traffic.

Some countries just have much better urban planning and road laws than your home city.

I want to know what good ideas you have seen abroad. What traffic solutions do you wish you had at home?

For example, in Germany, the "zipper merge" is a real traffic law. When a lane closes on the highway, cars must use both lanes all the way to the end. Then, they take turns merging one by one. This may seem obvious to some people but I have seen places where people get mad if you drive to the end and they also wont let you switch lanes on time. Drivers merge too early, block the empty lane, and then completely refuse to let you enter the open lane. It causes huge traffic jams and a lot of honking.

Have you seen a smart intersection, a better traffic law, or a good infrastructure idea in another country?

Tell me the country and the idea below. Let us talk about what actually works.

Im trying to learn a bit about UP, I’m really interested in economics and land-use. I’ve been wondering about a couple of proposals I’ve been hearing, for example;

- Modular housing, probably one of my favorite concepts especially at larger-scale or if you use union labor, for cheaper and faster assembly without needing to worry as much about building cycles.

- Solar grids and decentralized energy; I hate so many of our utility companies.

- A manufacturing boom of some sort, because I really don’t think we can do without anymore.

- Lots and lots of light rail.

What do you think is most important to making urban centers or other areas more affordable and accessible, and why? Any ideas or thoughts? Would love to hear more :)