r/urbanplanning

I’ve heard it said that we have reached a point where too much land has been preserved as open space or restricted by agricultural/historical designations. I’m sure this isn’t an issue in all areas, but it definitely seems to be near me. While the area is very beautiful and serene with expansive historical farms, you hardly ever see a subdivision of houses being put up or even vacant parcels of land to build on. GIS maps show that a lot of the major tracts of land have been put into agricultural conservancies and other types of designations restricting development. While I’m still generally pro-conservation, I’m starting to wonder how much of an impact it’s having on the current situation, and if there should be a limit to these sorts of things.

Keep in mind that I did not study urban planning, it is just a passive hobby of mine. So perhaps this isn’t as big an issue as I perceive it to be. Any input appreciated!

I studied planning for undergrad and graduated in 2024. Managed to get a job straight out of uni at a local authority and i basically work across a few teams including our planning team.

I really am passionate about this field and they know it but all i get to work on are basically ‘crumbs’ - meeting minutes, some work on policy projects and registering planning apps etc. I’ve been applying to so many graduate planner jobs but i’ve had no luck.

I dont know what to do and i feel like im going to be stuck here for a while. ive been here for over two years now and i dont feel any progression and i dont see them giving me any training opportunities to be a fully qualified planner.

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Parking spots are expensive. The last study I saw mentioned $30k-80k per spot in California, and that was 2019 dollars.

So whenever I see people clamoring for "affordable" housing near transit, I wonder why we're not doing more to clarify the costs of private parking to the public. If 2 parking spots are making a $650k unit $150k more expensive than it would be otherwise, why not let people know that?

So

What if we simply require developers to submit a second initial proposal for development near transit that details the median cost per unit for whatever they could build if they built 0 parking spots on their development?

Does anyone live somewhere that does something like this?

Hello all!

I’ve been reflecting on how property rights directly dictate the lifespan and adaptability of our cities. In the West, we hold fee simple titles but face perpetual property taxation and zoning limits. In contrast, places like China utilize state-owned land with 70-year residential use-rights, allowing the state a sovereign reset button on urban layout when leases expire.

Essentially, both systems challenge the concept of absolute, allodial ownership: one functions via perpetual tax "rent," the other via direct state leasing.

I'd love to hear perspectives from planners, municipal employees, and international developers on the structural trade-offs here:

Land Assembly & Redevelopment: Does the fee simple model create insurmountable bottlenecks for major infrastructure and density upgrades due to holdouts, whereas leasehold systems streamline urban renewal?

Public Planning vs. Individual Liberty: How do these systems balance personal stability and wealth generation with a city's need to adapt to changing demographics and climate realities over a century?

Funding: What are the planning trade-offs between a system funded by recurring local property taxes versus one funded by state-level land allocation?

If you have worked or studied urban systems under both frameworks, how did the legal reality of "ownership" change the physical reality of the built environment?

Thanks.

I've seen a big mix of discussion around biking infrastructure. Some places are truly death traps barren of any infrastructure and with psycho drivers.

Other areas in North America actually have dedicated lanes and paths.

How is it where you live?

Informal, incrementally grown areas tend to have more lively urban conditions than centrally planned areas, even when the centrally planned areas are materially superior by every conventional metric. In particular, Kowloon Walled City, while rightly considered a poor environment from standard metrics of fire safety, sanitation, crime, etc, also had a lively community with a dynamic internal economy. While it's former neighbor, the government housing tower complex, Tung Tau Estate, exhibits little of the liveliness and none of the economic vitality, but does provide an adequate housing environment by those same metrics that Kowloon fails. We really only use standard metrics to evaluate the quality of built environments, but we don't have explicit metrics to measure where the Walled City succeeds but Tung Tau fails. The difference appears to be in the making process itself. Incremental, adaptive growth generally makes environments alive, while centrally planned and mass-produced urban spaces largely make environments with much less life.

Jane Jacobs identified the same pattern in her example of Boston's North End being classified as a slum in need of urban renewal intervention, while simultaneously being a vibrant, safe, and tight knit community.

Similar observations can be made regarding the favelas in Rio de Janeiro versus the "tower in the park" government housing projects. Though, I have heard there is now gentrification taking place in certain favelas in Rio. Would Kowloon Walled City be gentrifying if it were still extant?

The harder questions are: Can urban planning make places as dynamically interlocked as Kowloon or the favelas while also providing adequate material conditions by conventional standards?

What are some similar careers that still focus on this, but still make like more than 100k, hopefully like 150k+. Thanks for all the help!

What cities do you think would be suited for this tower design? My thoughts include Copenhagen (Denmark), Oslo (Norway), Delhi (India), Mumbai (India), Doha (Qatar), Beirut (Lebanon), Charlotte (North Carolina, USA), Casablanca (Morocco), Muscat (Oman), Raleigh (North Carolina, USA), Saskatoon (Saskatchewan, Canada), Gaborone (Botswana), Dar es Salem (Tanzania), and Phoenix (Arizona).

Salutations! I’m in the early stages of developing a video essay that’s analyzing the transformation of a fictional town through the lens of gentrification, and discussing how this perspective lends itself to greater themes in the story the town is from. However, even though I feel like I can make a case for the phenomenon I’ve observed in this story being gentrification, I’m struggling to find sources that describe it with the same catalyst.

Most of the definitions of gentrification I’m finding describe it as high-income residents slowly moving into and displacing low-income neighborhoods—in the process, certain kinds of businesses may follow suit and change the overall culture of a community. In the story I’m analyzing, the catalyst is a corporation which reshapes the town in its image while devastating its population. I’m almost certain this is a form of gentrification, but I’m looking for real life examples of this kind of thing happening that explicitly call it that.

As a planner, I’m well aware that a lot of restrictions were put over us due to improper planning done by our forefathers such as Robert Moses and Edmund bacon which I believe we as a field have have atoned for.

So my question is do you think it’s time for planners to start making decisions again rather that just “recommend”

Hi all, I’m still very indifferent in what I want to do for a career. I’m currently working in the music industry doing assistant work and such but the money isn’t all there. I also do PT work such as Amazon or FedEx. I have a bachelors degree for music administration and I really don’t want to go back to college. I graduated in 2022 and have since been trying to fulfill my dream. I’ve been doing research in urban planning recently and I think I’ll like it but most jobs do require a masters. Can I not get a certificate in GIS and see how far I can go?

Here is the first in a series of substack articles that will analyze the human built environment through the lens of cognitive science, ecology and thermodynamics, felt experience, and enclosure of the commons. In this article I discuss the experience of the contemporary suburban baseball complex versus the archetypal neighborhood field or sandlot. The transition is largely driven by the same capitalist logic that attempts to enclose and commodify most experience.

I've been reading more about underground utility damage during construction projects, and one thing I can't figure out is where the process usually fails. In theory it seems straightforward: contractor submits an 811 ticket, utilities respond and mark lines, crews wait for clearance, then excavation starts. But utility strikes still happen often enough that it clearly doesn't always work that cleanly in practice. What I'm curious about is whether these incidents are usually caused by missing/inaccurate utility data, contractors rushing work, expired tickets, poor communication between office and field crews, or just the overall complexity of managing a lot of moving parts at once. From an urban planning or infrastructure management perspective, where do people think the biggest weak point actually is? Is this mostly a contractor workflow issue, a utility coordination issue, or something broader about how fragmented infrastructure records are?

For me it’d either be transit planning, doing either service planning or multimodal or parks planning