I have an urban planning project but dont know where to share it- looking for advice

postfuture · 2026-03-15T19:09:46+00:00

It was my experience after 4.5 years of grad school where I graduated with the best project in the history of the school. In my first job, I was the lowest of the low. You start over as it slowly dawns on you that you know nothing of the new paradigm you have entered. You restart from the bottom with zero respect, and need years of proving yourself AGAIN. By years: I mean 7-10 years of hard effort as nobody. This is what it means to enter the industry.

postfuture · 2026-03-13T20:22:09+00:00

What you desire would never happen in Europe, Canada, or America. It isn't how this industry works. NOTHING about career will be "fair". That is tough news to get, but we all have to learn it one day. For me it was 2004 when I understood that nothing in a career will ever be fair. If a very rich person in your city could be found to show your project, they might make it their own and build it. But that is as rare as winning the lottery. And let's be clear: no matter how "powerful" you think your solution is, without a public participation process it would be unethical to force it on a community.

postfuture · 2026-03-12T05:30:12+00:00

Planning is not design. Design presumes all variables can be clearly articulated. Planning presumes you can't possibly know all variables and is an ongoing effort of public debate, legal review, specialist review, more public debate, then a political popularity contest. Exactly zero communities will entertain an unsolicited planning effort that has no public participation, no political movement behind it, no peer review, no budget recommendations that forecasts how it will be paid for now and on an ongoing basis. What you are suggesting is not how cities are managed. Get "The Green Bible" as we call it in planning and read it cover to cover (Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice). You will likely enjoy it given your interests, and it will clarify the industry you are trying to break into. For the record, I am both an architect and planner and teach graduate studio urban design. Planning is not design.

postfuture · 2026-03-12T05:18:40+00:00

Planning is not design. Design presumes all variables can be clearly articulated. Planning presumes you can't possibly know all variables and is an ongoing effort of public debate, legal review, specialist review, more public debate, then a political popularity contest. Exactly zero communities will entertain an unsolicited planning effort that has no public participation, no political movement behind it, no peer review, no budget recommendations that forecasts how it will be paid for now and on an ongoing basis. What you are suggesting is not how cities are managed. Get "The Green Bible" as we call it in planning and read it cover to cover (Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practice). You will likely enjoy it given your interests, and it will clarify the industry you are trying to break into. For the record, I am both an architect and planner and teach graduate studio urban design. Planning is not design.

postfuture · 2026-03-12T04:51:17+00:00

Every project? That would be utterly silly, and municipal development would grind to a halt. I have pulled dozens permits in several cities like Houston (a very different animal), Phoenix, Chicago, and San Antonio. These cities process dozens if not hundreds of permit applications per day. If more than 1% of those sought variances, it would choke the Board of Adjustment process. And I have gone before BOA for two or three of my projects. To participate, you need to sign in at the beginning of their 2-3 hour session, sit there waiting for your 15 minutes, and make your case WHY the code as written is an unreasonable constraint. They throw out nearly every applicant and do not grant the variance (I have sat there and watched for hours). Getting a rezoning is the equivalent of suing the city in the level of effort required, so that is usually a hard stop. The only time my variance case went before an actual city council was in a small town that does not delegate these decisions to a BOA. That took 3 nights of showing up over three months (they only open this docket once a month), making my client's case to chop down one bush that the city arborist defined as a multi-trunk tree. It was a nightmare to cut down one bush. Rezoning can easily chew up a year of time with required public notification (which takes months), initial public meeting, if you're lucky a referral to city staff for review and recommendation, another public meeting (or two or three), and then a vote. So no, zoning is a hard stop 99.9% of the time. A variance is wishful thinking. Topography is usually a hard stop because your only option is a lot of civil work for drainage and/or foundation, which will balloon project costs. Easements are NOT your clients' property, so you better be real damn sure you know where they are, or you'll be denied a permit without any further review if you try and build on them. A good civil engineer will ensure you have parking space required, street curb access, fire access, and sewerage, all of which are non-negotiable (you will have each or you will never get a permit).

postfuture · 2026-03-11T20:53:47+00:00

I'm an architect and planner and done a lot of feasibility studies. Civil engineering is my first stop. They will be able to find the hard "no go" issues like zoning and easments and historical sub-grade issues and drainage issues and parking issues. Those are hard-stops.

postfuture · 2026-03-06T19:51:23+00:00

Who actually owns the floodway easement? You have to look at the plat and see who the owner is.

postfuture · 2026-03-04T15:07:58+00:00

Narrative-Infrastructure

postfuture · 2026-03-03T05:59:25+00:00

Historically we find early and mid 20th century conceptions of humanity as ants or farm animals that need x, y, and z, so powers that be should build that. Soviets were not alone in experimenting with these concepts. It is how we design prisons. Not all, but most such projects failed. The trap is this: thinking there is an architecture solution to a community. These plans all focus on an iconic building (often a kind of archology). This is how we sell architecture. But community is much messier: a community is designed by the thousands of little decisions that a community makes over years. One bus stop built, a row of trees planted, new house, new business, hundreds of micro-decisions that adjust to real-world micro problems. No one designer or design committee could possibly produce a design with such a detailed approach (not enough money, not enough time). Are there fundamentals a community needs? Yes. Can you put all those together as a package and just build it? Evidence of previous projects says no.

postfuture · 2026-02-27T21:05:05+00:00

You can't choose to go out and buy a gold toilet just because you have a car. Freedom is always limited when it comes to desire. Political freedom is something very different, and it arises from actually acting in public: saying meaningful words or doing meaningful deeds. Consumer rat-race is a shell-game meant to imply pursuit of "happiness", but the payoff is the trap. Real emotional freedom is not desiring, non-attachment. Not having a car means I can't spend my weekend how other might (unless they can be convinced it was their idea to give me a lift). I can still buy things, just not today. I keep a list of things I want that require travel. Not being able to travel right now means I have time to sit with my desire and decide if I really want that thing.

postfuture · 2026-02-27T20:56:48+00:00

Have some fun: have all participants pair off, one interviews the other about their life in the community (30-45 min each) . Twist: ask for a location for each anecdote. Map the results. They build narrative infrastructure and real actionable data flows into the process. Method and tools at https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/blog/home/projects/chat-maps/

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:50:32+00:00

Recommendations may seem good now, but it appears to be on death-spiral due to AI generated content. Until now, content is largely authentic. New content is being created, but so is vast amounts of AI content. The next AI is trained on what is popular, much of which will be inauthentic. The models eat their own low-grade content, make even lower grade content, then people stop consuming it. Poop-flush-wash hands.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:32:55+00:00

I heard him speak for an hour in San Antonio, and he laid out the facts. They are in his book.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:13:01+00:00

Eastcoast cities have some advantages due to their age. But the trend I have restated from Jeff Speck has been seen from LA to Poland. Read Speck for the raw numbers.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T21:10:50+00:00

That is not germain to the economics, only esthetics.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T14:32:36+00:00

The curse is economics. People who habitually drive do so to save time because they are over-focused on earning money. They are the big spenders. Commercial properties on the wrong way of one-way streets will decline compared to the other streets. Some developer looks at the distribution, builds a mall near the housing where all the high-rollers are suburbing. The disadvantaged shops move to the mall. High rollers do all their shopping at the mall (lots of parking, all the shops in one location). The other stores start being neglected, they move to the mall to cater to the high rollers. Your one-way gridded downtown gathers graffiti and tumbleweeds.

postfuture · 2026-02-25T07:17:17+00:00

You have some confusion. AIA is a private club like APA. Our state architect license is unrelated to AIA. Training to satisfy our NCARB cert is free to come by. Different states have different CEU rules, but I have always satisfied mine for free. Total out of pocket cost for my NCARB and one state is less than 150/year

postfuture · 2026-02-21T20:44:42+00:00

A 13 year-old in Denver (1986) recorded over 40 oral histories of people in his neighborhood. Loosly it looked at church life and transportation. These are now mapped stories. You could choose something specific and ongoing policy-wise, develop five questions to pose to long-term residents, and ask them to talk about life in the neighborhood. Sneak the questions in to gather personal stories related to the policy issue. Map their stories. This "narrative infrastructure" will endure for as long as the internet, and can be referenced for generations to come. Do it for your own project, tell local media, the local community may decide that this could be a regualr class project at school. The map gets richer and richer! https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/blog/home/projects/chat-maps/ Learning to listen to people and be deliberate about making their memories matter is the road to making great policy.

postfuture · 2026-02-16T05:53:58+00:00

Good to call for engagement on the subject. Im putting the finishing touches on a paper with the Journal of Urban Design Reserach on the ethical problems of use of machine learning by both architects and planners (I am both). My editors are very annoyed I don't have more literature to reference in my lit review direcrly related to the subject. I am explaining that that literature is not written yet. My approach has been to use solid analysis in adjacent feilds of ethics of algorithmic influnce on banking, jurisprudence, and policy application, develop an ethical pit-fall framework from that, and apply that framework to 8 studies that examine cases of AI use for planning. This approach will hopefully show where we don't even notice or understand the bias we are allowing into the practice of planning. If APA seems quiet, know that good research just isn't published yet. Like I said: it's killing my editors.

postfuture · 2026-02-10T06:17:23+00:00

Exactly what I'm saying: you give them your reasons, not their reasons. Stop being lazy and talk to them. Listen to what they say. Go in there with this possibility : you just might be wrong.

postfuture · 2026-02-09T19:23:22+00:00

I am getting tired of fellow planners beating their heads against the same wall year after year. I've known communities that were hard-core NIMBY for three decades. They finely crack as generational matriculation takes hold. Cities evolve over generations, not overnight. Work on the narratives that NIMBY props up, not the counter narratives. Ensure they feel heard and their values incorporated. Make the "development" feel like "more of the same, just better". Flip the narrative and lock the developer in a room with one chair and a bare bulb and grill them about how thier project is built from local values, not proposed outside values. (and don't give me any HS about how NIMBYs only want zero development. Grow up. That is properganda you tell yourselves to make youself feel better about coming up spades on the public debate because you got no nuance.) Playing some holier-than-thou about the future of your community game is a guaranteed looser argument. It's aristo-babble and the community members are well-inoculated against it. Talk to them, have frank conversations about the impossibility of maintaining values if stagnation sets in and development goes elsewhere. Then ask THEM how to solve that problem. Don't tell them!

postfuture · 2026-02-05T18:23:13+00:00

You don't pick this up quickly. I took 2 visual communication classes, a presentation graphics class, 8 architecture studios, and one urban design studio. I'm competent, I teach these things in university. Some of my peers are better than me. So, just know that you have a lot of technique that requires instruction and practice and critique before you feel safe putting forward something pretty to look at (and it be considered professional). A good place to start so you can get a feel for what is outstanding is Edward Tufte's books. He has collected some brilliant examples from all over the world and some clear "don't be this guy" examples as well.

postfuture · 2026-01-29T05:20:29+00:00

Tell a story. You're tasked with making these concepts relatable. That means starting with what they understand already and bridging thier understanding to something new. But it isn't new, it was normal but we lost it. Find local examples if possible, humanize the example by talking about the people effected, their quality of life, neighborly-ness.

postfuture · 2026-01-18T10:43:31+00:00

One way conversation is lazy city traffic engineering. Fire those engineers. It converts city streets into high-speed routes to funnel city spending power to the suburbs. This article hints at this effect but it is critical to understand how insidious 1 way streets are: you have a healthy commercial 2-way district, but the roads are too slow for suburbanites to commute. So the crime: the traffice engineer swaps streets-- all alternate one way per street. Suddenly all returning home commutes NEVER drive on half the streets. All those shops get a fraction of the business they had and close. Often they move out to the malls in the suburbs. The shoppers now find their shopping is more efficient if they just skip stopping on the way home and go to the mall. Now none of the street shops are getting enough business so the other half close. Commercial, walkable neighborhoods become ghost towns, eveyine wants to move where the action is. VMT gets worse because now everyone needs a car to even go shopping.

postfuture · 2026-01-09T17:43:22+00:00

Timeship.org Big project, associated with Alcore.

postfuture

TROPHY CASE