The Death of the City Planning Profession

By Dom Nozzi

May 28, 2019

A few years ago, I let my American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) certification expire because AICP and the American Planning Association represent a profession (public sector planning) that has lost its way.

The profession has lost any sense of an admirable or societally desirable mission. It has lost the inspiring vision it once had.

Conventional city (and county or regional) planning has become sterile and drowns in the minutia of “needed” parking and “needed” throughput of cars. Of an obsession with separating “incompatible” land uses from each other (such as homes and retail) through strict and mindless adherence to zoning regulations.

Both of these single-minded efforts are tragically quite counterproductive, as they are precisely the opposite of what a vibrant, healthy, sustainable city needs.

The profession has shedded any interest in urban design, human scale, pedestrian quality, timeless design, and quality of life. In my 20 years as a town planner, I was little more than a paper pushing clerk who signed off on developers seeking to create car-happy places.

For example, nearly all of my day-to-day work involved confirming that a proposed development had “sufficient” (ie, excessive) parking. Parking requirements that had no basis in reality or science or what a given development or neighborhood actually needed. Given how toxic car parking happens to be for a quality city, what could be more misguided? Eventually, I was marginalized and censored by administrators, supervisors, and my elected officials when I started to move toward designing for people rather than cars.

The desire to “make no one unhappy” is now a single-minded obsession for nearly all American public sector town planners. And in our car-based world where there is nothing anywhere near as important to achieve as easy motoring, this translates into an almost exclusive focus on promoting car travel.

This, of course, is a rode to ruin, as such a mission leads to a perpetuation of the downwardly spiraling car-oriented status quo.

Shame on public sector planners, the APA, and AICP for leaving such a terrible legacy for future generations.

 

 

Was Boulder More “Enlightened” in the Past?

By Dom Nozzi

December 23, 2018

A friend of mine recently told me that she thought the city of Boulder, Colorado used to be “enlightened” in the past. That is, more wise, progressive, and problem-solving than the average city.

But I don’t know that I agree that Boulder used to be enlightened.

While Boulder has a national reputation for being on the cutting edge of city and transportation innovation – and a wellspring of progressivism, that reputation turns out to be far from accurate.

For example, since at least the 1960s, many (most?) in Boulder have held the quite misguided, ruinous view that car travel needs to be made as easy as possible, and the way to do that was to slow growth and minimize density.

Better yet would be to stop growth.

Doing this would allow the city to achieve the “nirvana” of happy cars (free-flowing traffic and abundant free parking). The reason why that ruinous belief has been a near consensus in Boulder for so long is that both politically conservative wealthy folks AND political liberals were more than happy to agree to it. In America, both conservatives and liberals put happy cars at or near the top of their quality of life priority list.

This belief has poisoned Boulder thinking since at least the 1960s. The city has fooled many in America into thinking that it was “enlightened” because of an accident of geography. Boulder is very fortunate to be in a location that is so spectacular that it attracts wealthy, intelligent people. Such wealth and intelligence gave the city the ability to admirably tax itself to buy a greenbelt, which provides enduring quality of life for the city, and creates the illusion that the city is “enlightened” generally.

However, accomplishing “enlightened” objectives requires far more than being wealthy enough to buy a greenbelt or build a multi-million dollar bike path system.

It also requires the wisdom to adopt enlightened parking, roadway, land use, and urban design guidelines, to name just a very few significant urban design tactics.

And in those areas, Boulder has been in the Dark Ages since the 1960s – largely because of the political consensus that buying a greenbelt, and stopping/slowing growth to keep cars happy was enough.

It is not.

Nor is it even possible. Or desirable.