A lengthy piece in the Design Observer Group written by Thomas Campanella, a faculty member of UNC Chapel Hill, decries the "trivial" nature of the planning profession.  In "Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning," Campanella blames Jacobs for removing the god-like aura surrounding the city planner, and sending the planner back to the "hot and crowded city street" to have the same amount of input as regular residents.  It caught my interest because of the healthy dose of skeptical introspection offered up by its author (and because it mimicked a post title I came up with about a month ago).  However, I'm not convinced that we should return to the days of making Big Plans.

A Moses era planner scopes out his work.


Campanella argues that planners should take back some of the rights we have bestowed upon the communities we plan for: we are the experts, after all.  However, his argument is misguided.  Campanella uses examples from other fields to demonstrate the folly in our ways, such as in the case of food:  "Imagine public health officials giving equal weight to the nutritional wisdom of teenagers — they are stakeholders, after all!"  I can indeed imagine it.  Without input from the grassroots and community at large, an intervention is bound to fail, be it a new highway or a soda tax.  Perhaps it is my naive optimism that encourages me to hold on to the belief that a community can plan for itself, our roll is simply to guide the process.

The rest of his article seems to be caught up in the planning follies of his older, more established peers than reflecting the reality of the young planners I know.  He points to a "lack of speculative courage and vision" and a myopic strategy that emphasizes the local to the detriment of large-scale infrastructure projects like high-speed rail, which simpy isn't true.  The planners around me recognize the sorry state that his generation left us with, and we're working with the tools we're given to change it.  The interests of my fellow Tufts planners run the gamut, but all of them hold the larger issues of CO2 emissions, spatial justice, and economic sustainability clearly in view as they formulate their ideas.

I do however, agree with the conclusions Campanella makes later in the article.  He recognizes that young planners have limitless ideas and ambition, and asks, "How can we ensure that the idealism of our students is not extinguished as they move into practice?" Eventually he concludes, "planners today need not a close-up lens or a wide-angle lens but a wide-angle zoom lens.  They need to be able to see the big picture as well as the parts close up; and even if not trained to design the parts themselves, they need to know how all those parts fit together."  He calls for three years of planning education as opposed to two, and I would agree that this is a good proposition.  As a student pursuing a dual degree with the school of Nutrition Science and Policy, I'm wrapping up my third year in planning school.  I've been equipped with the wide-angle lens of federal food and agricultural policy, as well as the zoom lens of community planning.  I've had time to explore some of the larger theoretical underpinnings that provide a historical background to the city, as well as the economic and physical specifics of some of the systems that make the city what it is today.

If Jane Jacobs brought problems that are now "trivilizing" the planning profession, it might actually be those same trivialities that end up saving it.  Big ideas and sustainable visioning are not exclusive to those young planners attracted to the profession.  In fact, these traits are symptom of a generation.  It will take a new workforce of planners to turn our youth's vision of a just and sustainable future in to reality.  The skills we've picked up as consensus builders and mediators will come in handy when we're trying to help a community decide between a farm and a solar power facility.