The Inheritance Problem: Urban Planning and Community Engagement in U.S. Cities

Source Summary

Urban planning is often confused with adjacent disciplines: urban design, environmental policy, civic strategy, local politics, and data analytics. Truthfully, the overlap makes the field difficult to define clearly. In practice, it is often easier to recognize bad planning than to articulate what good planning is. When planning works well, it disappears. It removes friction from daily life so completely that people rarely think to credit a planner at all. At its core, urban planning is the relationship people have with their environments , and when that relationship is functioning, the mechanics of housing , transportation, affordability, access, and inclusion should feel ordinary and expected.