The Best Laid Plans

I am a planner. At least that's the plan... I am finishing up the first of two years in graduate studies to learn the (not so) gentle art of urban planning. The very term conjures up for many people all the wretched excess of the welfare state: massive housing projects and slum clearances; or maybe the endless splatter of low-rise anonymia, isolation and segregation. Indeed, we spend much of our time dissecting the follies of history and self-diagnosing as a profession. We attempt, vainly perhaps, to answer why we don't build great cities anymore, and why we knowingly ingest poison time and again, even as we rail against it. It's not all doom and gloom, of course. The profession is on the cutting edge of sustainable design and progressive thinking, and it seems to attract people who want more than a fat paycheck in a career. In fact, there has probably not been a more exciting or critical time to be engaged in the art of city-building since Hausmann razed Paris. For it is in the cities, and how we manage them, that the bigger challenges of climate change, resource scarcity and social equity must be met.

This blog is not about planning. It is about understanding how we interact with the physical world and how it interacts with us. To do this, we must scratch below the surface. We need to look, to see, and to recognize the difference. Most of all, we must never, ever stop learning.