(Part 2) Best products from r/urbanplanning

The following comment operates on the assumption that you are interested in American urban planning from an administrative or public policy focus. For real estate development, urban design/architecture, or international issues, look elsewhere.

A solid, all purpose undergraduate major: philosophy. You can teach yourself subjects and even methods, but to learn how to think critically and write about complex subjects in a clear way you need quality, focused instruction and that's the purpose of philosophy. Outside of your general major requirements, take exclusively analytic philosophy courses. Typically there is an analytic philosophy survey course but for other courses identify which professors in your department operate in this tradition (and take teaching seriously) and take whatever courses they offer, regardless of your personal interest in the subject going in. Common subjects include logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, etc. These courses will discipline your thinking and writing in ways that other majors won't. These skills are absolutely fundamental and lay the groundwork for a successful, highly adaptable career.

Outside of that major, which will fulfill your humanities requirements, you should fill your general requirements with courses like U.S. government (typically fulfilling a social science requirement), microeconomics and macroeconomics (social science, business, and occasionally quantitative), and environmental science (natural science). Take as many economics courses as you can. You can also take a basic geography course focused on cities but in my experience these courses teach you what you can easily learn from disciplined study on your own time. Focus your electives on methods courses, specifically statistics and digital mapping (GIS). You can also easily learn these online but if you have to fill up requirements, stick with these.

"But wait, don't I need to know something about urban planning?" Definitely! But you don't need to use up valuable course time on this subjects unless you have top urban planning scholars teaching undergraduate courses at your school, which probably isn't the case. Feel free to share your program and I'm sure the great community here can point out any top scholars active there. Otherwise, focus on teaching yourself the subject over summer and winter breaks. Read books by esteemed experts/scholars/writers in the field. A few broad essentials, all of which should be available at your public library:

• "Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (the essential urban planning text)
  
  
• "Triumph of the City" by Edward Glaeser (urban economics)
  
  
• "Zoned in the USA" by Sonia Hirt (land use planning)
  
  
• "Walkable City" by Jeff Speck (transportation/urban design)
  
  
• "Cities of Tomorrow" by Peter Hall (urban theory/history - don't hesitate to save a ton of money by buying an older edition!)
  
  Other users are welcome to contribute what they see as essentials. The key here is to read about urban planning relentlessly in your free time (important: this includes blogs!) and focus your coursework on skills development. This combination of philosophy/methods coursework and disciplined, independent reading will make you not only an issue expert, which are a dime a dozen, but a productive expert, someone who can approach a completely new problem and produce useful results.
  
  This is the path I have followed and I have been happy with the results. Hope this helps.
  
  Edit: grammar errors, typos, etc. fixes.

Asian cities are increasingly viewed as the new frontier of both the process of urbanisation and the exciting conceptual terrain for theorisation, especially so in the growing postcolonial literature. But I always have this uneasy feeling whenever I am speaking about Asian cities collectively, because it doesn't quite make sense to me - after all, how could the biggest continent on the planet that mothered three of the oldest civilisations and currently hosting the majority of world population be easily generalised and summarised? Personally I'd prefer to have a closer look into a particular country/culture you're interested in, which would be a lot more productive given its unique historical trajectory in urban development.

My past studies focused on Chinese cities and Singapore, and there are in fact tons of books and articles about urban planning in Asia. I'm not sure if you have access to them and if you'd be interested since many are highly academical, but I'll write type down a few things in my mind right now.

Wu (2015) Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China - this is basically an encyclopedia about urban planning in China which covered both the past and the present and is fairly easy to read. The book summarises the Chinese cities really well - you could still see ancient Chinese urban planning's legacy and influence in East Asia even in the contemporary world, e.g. Kyoto and Chang'an, the capital city of Tang Dynasty; the Soviet influence is still very much traceable in many Chinese cities nowadays. Fulong Wu was my supervisor and I can guarantee that he's an expert in the field of Chinese planning and wrote a lot about cities, development, planning, and policies in China. Give him a quick search you'd find plentiful articles about Chinese cities and planning.

Heng (2002) 50 Years Of Urban Planning In Singapore - Singapore is definitely a unique city-state, and I'd say that this collection of articles covers a wide range of aspects of urban planning in Singapore and is something highly readable. In fact, the city kinda is a giant urban laboratory nowadays. Singapore's urban planning is undoubtedly influenced by the British colonial legacy but has grown out of it. It's rare to witness so many classic urban concepts coming alive within the same city. Also, give publications from the Centre of Liveable Cities a look too if you'd like to understand more about the details. Their articles cover a range of planning research in Asia and are all free to access. They post links to their work regularly on LinkedIn. In short, Singapore has been written a lot.

Roy (2004) Urban Informality : Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia and Roy (2011) Worlding Cities : Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global Anaya Roy focused a lot on Indian cities and her work contributes a lot to postcolonial urbanism. Definitely, not the easiest to read but her perspectives are very helpful to me.

The Western vs non-Western debate is something I often have mixed feelings about. The overemphasis of the Anglophone has to be overcome, but the world does not exist in this perfect binary. And I do believe that cities, since their very birth, have never been existed in silos - they form the early networks of civilisations and influence each other a lot. The communist legacy in China, the interplay between colonial planning and modernism in India, and the evolution of urban planning in Singapore are all fascinating, so happy googling and happy reading!

Worthwhile books from my shelf (note that my shelf has a particular flavor):

• The Geography of Nowhere - James Howard Kunstler
  
• Almost Anything by James Howard Kunstler
  
• "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building" - Christopher Alexander
  
• Almost Anything By Christopher Alexander
  
• Cities and the Wealth of Nations - Jane Jacobs
  
• Anything by Jane Jacobs
  
• How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand
  
• The High Cost of Free Parking - Donald Shoup
  
• Carfree Cities, and the Carfree Design Manual
  
• Planetizen Essential Urban Planning Reader
  
• Routledge Urban and Regional Planning Reader
  
• You can also look up university planning courses and see what is in their readers and book lists.
  
• Watch some TED Talks
  
• Read through MIT's OpenCourseWare materials on Urban Planning
  
  
  There are LOTS off different inroads to the planning profession. You may want to start narrowing your focus- "Urban Planning" is a multivariate discipline, encompassing land use, modeling, transit, transportation, redevelopment, ecological design, and many other fields. There are also gov't agencies, nonprofits, and for-profit companies. Are there any organizations or projects that you feel especially drawn to? Send your resume and a cover letter to them. Better yet, look them up, learn about who they are and what they do, and apply for any open internship solicitations.
  
  Think about what you like to do. Do you want to work with GIS/mapping/modeling? Do you enjoy legal issues? Do you like public outreach?
  
  There is an Urban Studies department at UT Austin. Urban Studies does not necessarily mean "Planning" though- it's often more like "Sociology of the City" which might not be what you need. Talk to an advisor in the department and talk to some students at different levels within the department.
  
  APA is the big planning professional organization. They have discounted student memberships and they have a chapter in your area. GO TO THEIR EVENTS. Follow their twitter.
  
  Follow your local planning agencies- transportation, regional, city, etc. Learn who is on what board. Read their agendas and minutes. Know what projects are going on and what projects are in the pipeline. Find a planner who is managing a project you are interested in and offer to take them to lunch/coffee. Do this once per week. Planners love lunch and coffee and they love to talk about their projects, especially if you make clear that you are not press and not just working on a school project.
  
  Dress well. Be confident.
  
  That should get you started. These some of the things I did, and some of the things I wish I had done, at the beginning of my career.
  
  [edited so many times because I can't help myself and I never remember Reddit formatting]
  

To start, don't read Jane Jacobs. This is planner blasphemy, but her stuff is old (albeit relevant) concepts, and while her ideas are generally good, you can get much more rewarding information from other modern reading -- most of which includes her ideas.

A couple that are relevant to your interests:

• The High Cost of Free Parking -- Shoup
  
• Context Sensitive Design for Thoroughfares -- ITE
  
• One Less Car - Furness ----- this one can be a bit preachy, but is good overall.
  
• If you're going to be working the 'burbs, This Book is invaluable. Amazing for historical context.
  
  If you're looking for more technical stuff, I can provide recommendations there, too.
  
  Growth management reading is SUPER valuable to any planner's career over the next couple of decades, at least.
  
  Law helps, too.

Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City: How Downtown can Save America, One Step at a Time”” is a personal favorite. He quotes his work in Lowell, MA throughout the book.

I’ve also been recommended to read Cheryl Heller’s “The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing the Creative Potential of Social Design” and while I haven’t yet had the chance to pick it up, I think it might be up the alley of what you’re looking for.

I’m halfway through James and Deborah Fallows’ “Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America” which is also excellent, and provides a great set of case studies in urban revitalization.

My own masters practica (in Emergency management) is on creating greater access to healthcare via some urban planning interventions in a similar New England city, if not the same one.

I’m local to Boston, and would be happy to loan you the first and last books, should you be interested.

Cheers!

As previously stated, both myself and my son would be dead within the first year of our lives if it weren't for the benefits that come along with being alive in the 20th and 21st century America.

I am not railing against the system. I am not a socialist, nor a federalist. I do be believe that smaller more local governance is better capable of solving local issues than larger more centralized government.

The reason that I have commented the way that I have is simply to suggest that there are other ways of doing things, and that those things might have different results. Here I talked about how a developer I knew was able to help his community by working with local credit unions instead of multi-natational banks. The credit union worked with the developer to get a lower interest rate paid back over a longer time than the larger banks were willing to offer. As a result, the developer was able to build high-quality affordable housing, which the community needed. Had he gone with a loan from a larger bank, he would not have been able to deliver as much value to the community. This is a simple way in which (within our current economic system) communities can add value to community development.

Similarly, in D.C. I have seen developments influenced by multi-national banks in ways that frustrated local politicians, residents, and the developer. Specifically around parking. I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but in a a transit rich part of the city a developer was proposing new multi-family housing that would stick to the city's required parking minimums. The Advisory Neighborhood Commission was on board with the parking minimums as were residents. The bank that was financing the project almost pulled because "there was not enough parking." The developer caved, redesigned the building to have fewer affordable units so it could accommodate superfluous underground parking. No one locally was happy.

If you'd like some more examples for how banks, developers, and other influencers from outside a community can negatively impact a community, I highly recommend you check out "Urban Fortunes" by Logon and Molotch.

Also, if you'd like to go on a global tour together we can check out and maybe live for a few days in many places where people have shit lives and shit jobs and shit prospects because people like us benefit from a system that is excellent at extracting wealth so that a relative few can live comfortably.

> Are you against people choosing to live in suburbs if they pay the full cost of doing so? ie: transportation & other infrastructure requirements

Why do you ask? Because as things stand, the cost of infrastructure and transportation is heavily socialized. And that is not even taking into account the significant externalities imposed by a sprawled, highway-heavy suburb on the environment as well as traffic problems into whatever city such highways end up in.

Even if suburban residents actually paid these cost (and I would argue that aforementioned externalities make this almost completely impractical), you still have to deal with the fact that adding to highway capacity actually makes traffic worse, not better.

People will bear a particular commute until the point at which it becomes... unbearable (duh). So because suburban living is attractive (which I'm not denying), not to mention almost always cheaper (at least to the individual) people will keep moving into the suburbs so long as their commute is still bearable, until eventually it isn't. Then they demand more highways, and the cycle repeats, though the actual commercial center of the city where everyone is going hasn't necessarily changed, so it's actually much, much harder to cram all these extra people in via highway after each cycle.

My favorite author on this topic is (Jane Jacobs)[http://www.amazon.ca/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0679600477] - she made some remarkably accurate predictions about the problems with highway-based sprawl and her arguments have not aged one bit.

>I believe he is referring to research showing that up to now, higher density cities with extensive transit have failed to improve commute times as too many people who live in condos end up driving to work anyways.

What research is that?? All the obvious super-dense residential cities (New York, San Fran, even Vancouver) have excellent ridership figures for public transit.

>Most jobs in a city are in the suburbs, so there is a lot of cross city travel that people use their cars for.

This isn't quite true - at the very least you'd have to agree that city centers have a much higher concentration (per capita, not square mile) of jobs. Think downtowns and commercial districts.

Other then heavy industry (which has been on the decline for a while now in terms of employment), most jobs in the suburbs are caused by office parks which basically come to exist the exact same way residential suburban development happens (cheap land, free highways, woo!), just for commercial tenants. Anything you do to one happens to the other.

> I would expect this should change as self-driving cars are implemented and road capacity doubles or more. High-speed trains of cars will be able to zip through cities.

But that's the point! We dont' have self-driving cars today (and probably not for a while) - but we DO have self-driving trains, as well as trams and elevated rail and subways and ferries and car coops and taxis and bike lanes.

I am sympathetic towards the argument that punishing people for driving is not a good way to encourage public transit use. The much better way is to simply provide better public transit. European cities make great use of transit and ridership is high throughout social classes.

> It goes without saying that housing affordability goes down as density goes up. At the moment, it's still cheaper overall to build low density 2-story houses out of wood than high density steel & concrete buildings.

But again, this is simply by virtue of the numerous externalities that you can get away with for single family homes. They are cheaper to build, yes, but are they actually more affordable to live in once you consider the cost of transport, the cost of providing public and civil services and so forth?


I should probably also mention that I'm not against suburbs as an idea, only against highway-based suburbs. "Street car suburbs" are actually quite sustainable and can contain their costs much more effectively. Ever watch Mad Men? Don Draper lives in the idyllic suburban wonderland of the 60s, but even he usually takes the train to work.

There are plenty of "healthy" suburbs to be found if you look for them. They maintain a pleasant low-density lifestyle but also introduce mixed-use blocks and localized medium-density "mini-downtowns". If you just want to do some shopping or go see a movie (or go to school) you can get by with walking, bus/trams or biking but you definitely have to take a commuter train to work. And of course all of this still combines just fine with occasional car use, which is now far less painful since you aren't perpetually filling up the streets to the point of unbearability.

The books mentioned so far are great ones to start with. The Geography of Nowhere is also a good primer for the amateur; Kunstler's style is provocative and interesting to read.

I've always found good planning histories to be pretty accessible as well (for those interested in the subjects). Here are some recommendations that aren't the "main offenders" people normally reference:

Bourgeois Utopias is an interesting history of "suburbia", and the various forms "suburban development" has taken throughout history.

Sprawl by Robert Bruegeman is a good "contrast" to a lot of books about planning. His essential premises are that sprawl isn't bad, that underlies our economic growth, and that people want it.

Just graduated with a master's in planning (in Canada). The first thing you should know is that you cannot go into this field for the money or for great job prospects. Getting a job right out of school is extremely difficult in both the US and Canada right now unless you have the right prior experience and skills (which school will not give you). Many people take unpaid internships (which is disgusting on the part of employers in my opinion) or have a long wait ahead of them for an entry-level job.
So if you do pursue planning for grad school make sure you are in no financial difficulties and that you have a backup plan or money to spare in case.

There is also a difference between what skills jobs want and what you'll learn in planning school. Planning school will focus heavily on "issues" in urban planning (social science, econ, history, etc). So you'll be writing term papers just like you are now in poli sci. You'll also learn a bit about planning law and the planning system but not nearly enough of what jobs want. And lastly, planners need to know some software, but this greatly depends on what type of job you have. Some typical programs include ArcGIS, AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator/Indesign.

Learning about the urban issues part of planning is not too difficult in comparison and there are a lot of great books.
The best one's I've read so far are also the books that are best to introduce anyone to the major issues in planning:

• The Geography of Nowhere
  
• Walkable City
  
• Straphanger
  
  
  If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to answer!

> The biggest difference is that I would be prouder of an architectural degree since it's harder to acquire and is viewed as more ambitious.

Put that thought aside for a while and try to figure out what type of career you're are interested in. I'm mainly thinking job functions and project types here. Then trace back from that to figure out which of the two are better suited for bringing you on that path (knowing that they probably both can if you change your mind later). Is it the specific site layout or the strategic planning vision that has your main interest?

Also, try to figure out what your primary interest in planning is. Real estate? Public spaces? Transportation? Fostering livable cities through mobility planning, promoting bicycling, converting surface parking into greenspaces or squares, etc. is a rising agenda in many cities for example. If that has your interest you can mold either of the two in a way that takes you in that direction (and reading Cities for People will be a good place to start).

In my experience people don't care too much about your educational background once you've landed your first job. From there on its all about what you've worked with.

edit: words and stuff

Amazing story and amazing journalism. I imagine stories like these will be common more common in the USA as the combination of climate change and our decreasing wealth starts increasing the divides between winners and losers and areas that become Red Zones, to use the language of this article.

Paolo Bacigalupi has written some good books exploring these themes:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7095831-ship-breaker

The more Republican-influenced literature tends to play out as a return to Jeffersonian farming freeholds with cities turning into wealthy enclaves surrounded by riotous welfare slaves:

https://www.amazon.com/Second-After-John-Matherson-Novel-ebook/dp/B002LATV16/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=one+second+after&qid=1569690259&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

My guess is we might see a little bit of both if we're unlucky.

Anyways thanks for sharing.

I think I get what you're saying - you wish /r/urbanplanning would acknowledge the fact that we have suburbs and post more things like the Build a Better Burb design challenge for Long Island, which does still endorse many of the things that do get discussed and posted here on the subreddit, like better transit access, increasing density (the slippery slope argument against density is that we want skyscrapers...), and improving a sense of place.

I'll definitely say that there's a lot to be had from the influence of land-use policies that could be changed to encourage transformations of suburbs to European-like strong towns linked by rail with greenspace in between, as is discussed in this article. However, a lot of these ideas aren't as easily applied elsewhere in US suburbs where suburbs came in after the decline of the railroads; Long Island is unique in its mostly electrified commuter rail services and lends itself better toward the idealistic transmogrification we'd love to see across the US. Perhaps this is the space of the discussion you're looking for?

On top of that, you still do have the issue that people do live in the suburbs for one or more of the features one finds/expects to find there. Actual implementation of land use policy can be very difficult when dealing with many individual property owners, even if those policies encourage the improvement of transport access, community amenities, public spaces, etc.

I've always been intrigued by the book Retrofitting Suburbia but haven't pulled the trigger on buying the book yet - I'm still going through the Shoup bible and my signed copy of Triumph of the City.

Human Transit and Trains, Buses, People (written by a professor of transportation at Rice University) are excellent introductions to transportation. Jarret Walker, author of Human transit, also has a blog he updates quite frequently. Strong Towns has a biking and parking section of their blog and an editorial called Ask R. Moses that has questions answered by civil engineers, typically professionals that run transportation. NACTO also has an excellent guide in urban bike transportation for something specific that we're using for a bike-ped class this semester.


As you explore these topics you'll start to find organizations like NACTO and people like Jarret Walker you'll be able to find webinars and youtube videos as well as additional reading material to fill in those gaps.


If you want something truly academic, I have a pdf of a textbook I used in my transportation fundamentals class last semester I'm happy to email you if you'll DM me.

Natures Metropolis by William Cronon

" Cronon's history of 19th-century Chicago is in fact the history of the widespread effects of a single city on millions of square miles of ecological, cultural, and economic frontier. Cronon combines archival accuracy, ecological evaluation, and a sweeping understanding of the impact of railroads, stockyards, catalog companies, and patterns of property on the design of development of the entire inland United States to this date. Although focused on Chicago and the U.S., the general lessons it teaches are of global significance, and a rich source of metaphors for the ways in which colonization of physical space operates differently from, and similarly to, colonization of cyberspace. This is a compelling, wise, thorough--and thoroughly accessible--masterpiece of history writ large. Very Highest Recommendation. "

Here's some books from my library:

The Affordable Housing Reader - Basics on how affordable housing in the US works (or how it doesn't work...)

Cities for People/Walkable City/Death and Life of Great American Cities - Classics that really pertain to most things

The Public Wealth of Cities - How to leverage public/city assets to benefit the most amount of people

The Color of Law - How racism has shaped our cities

Happy City - Planning for social health

> especially leftist urbanism (anti suburbs and single family housing, pro mass-transit etc)

I'd be weary of calling this 'leftist urbanism,' since all of these are perfectly compatible with right-wing viewpoints, just handled very differently. You're looking more for sustainable urbanism and the social impacts of it. The books I have recommended above do all have a centrist or left lean to it though.

As an entry level planner you'd probably be staffing the counter and helping process land use permits, so customer service skills and professionalism will likely be pretty important. I got a graduate degree in planning and we only opened a zoning code for one assignment, where we looked at a property to see if a proposed use could be built given the zoning, etc.

So my recommendation would be to maybe find a zoning textbook (or A Better Way to Zone), look at the zoning code and recent staff reports from the places you're thinking of applying, and see if you can reach out to a planner there for an informational interview through the local APA chapter or just a cold call.

Since you're into transportation, I recommend "Still Stuck in Traffic". It's rather economics-oriented at times, but has an excellent explanation of how traffic congestion happens, and it also dispels some myths about transit. For instance, in the US, transit doesn't help to solve congestion; rather, congestion, helps transit and depending on how it's implemented, transit can actually cause congestion.

Books:

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall

A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities by Donald L. Elliott

Anything by Leon Krier (Architecture: Choice or Fate being my favorite) or William H. Whyte (The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces being my favorite)


Essays:

Jane Jacobs and the The Death and Life of American Planning by Thomas J. Campanella

Toward and Urban Design Manifesto by Allen Jacobs and Donald Appleyard.

Fixing existing developments and creating better ones in the future are very different beasts. One very influential group working on latter is the Congress for New Urbanism. A useful volume by a few of CNU's leading practioners is Suburban Nation. One pertinent critique of New Urbanism though is that is has been relatively ineffective about the retrofitting you describe. For that you might check out books like Retrofitting Suburbia.

If you want a good rant on how we got into the mess J.H. Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere is an angry read. On patterns that underlay places we like being in, there is the always present work of Christopher Alexander. For my money one of the most under-read great urbanists of our time is Richard Sennett, particularly his book The Uses of Disorder.

Finally, Jacob's has a lot of prescriptive stuff in Death and Life. I'll give you that it is not as rule-based as most contemporary approaches, but therein lies its greatness.

Jan Gehl has tons of research on this topic. This book of his is worth checking out for sure.

Were you inspired by Trains, Buses, People? He has a very similar map for every city in the US served by rail with the addition of highlighting job centers.

For a good, clear, readable introduction to the academic research on this topic, check out Anthony Downs's "Still Stuck in Traffic" and his triple convergence paradox.

Jan Gehl - Cities for People

Midwestern cities are especially fascinating because they were all founded fairly recently so you have a full recorded history of the people, why they decided to build there, and the decisions they made that sealed the fate of their city.

Many of them have economically collapsed or been destroyed, often more than once! Sometimes to recover, sometimes not.

I would recommend the documentary series about the early history of Chicago. Mostly because the Chicago of that era was essentially an unlivable city - anarchic, polluted, uneducated -- that somehow managed to survive and thrive no matter what kind of natural, social, and/or economic disaster the city encountered.
It's a good way to understand, not what is enjoyable about a successful city, -- but rather, what is essential.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPBDWNYZbA&t=682s

https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Metropolis-Chicago-Great-West/dp/0393308731

https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-natures-metropolis-chicago-and-the-great-west-by-william-cronon/