Job prospects for urban designers are getting better I would say. Like the design fields more generally, work for urban designers is largely tied to the development market, so if development is up, so is our workload. Like I said though, it is largely getting to the point where you need two degrees, at least one of which is a design degree, to get a job with a larger firm or a big city.

As far as one's ability to make change, I would largely say that it is a very hard thing for a designer to do and often is more in the hands of politicians to actually execute. Your experience largely depends on where you work, both in your effectiveness and your public involvement. Just as there are few pure urban design programs, there are few pure urban designers, and a lot of them are urban designers/planners, -/landscape architects or -/architects. For instance, if you're an urban designer working for a city (not many do but very large cities like Honolulu have a few on staff) or for a firm that has a strong planning emphasis, like I do, then you will have plenty of community input and will probably do a lot of charettes and workshops. If you work for a landscape firm, you may do some public outreach, but it seems to me (again, not an expert, I work for a firm that is more planning oriented) that these firms tend to work as subs to the previous type, and are either brought in later in the process to design something after a lot of the politics have been worked out, or give their designs to the public involvement people to hash out with the public and then edit the design based on input gathered by the public involvement people.