Daniel sent us this one — he's asking what urban planning actually is, who these people calling themselves urban planners are, whether most major cities even have them, what their backgrounds look like. And then the real kicker: why can't we just let cities develop organically? I love this question because it sounds simple and it's not.
It's really not. And the organic development question in particular — that's the one that gets planning Twitter into fistfights. But let me start with the basics before we get to the fistfight. Urban planning, at its core, is the discipline of deciding what gets built where, and how all those pieces connect. Zoning, transportation networks, public spaces, infrastructure timing, density rules, building heights, where the sewer lines go before the houses show up. It's the invisible skeleton that a city hangs on.
It's not just drawing pretty boulevards. It's the unglamorous stuff.
It's mostly the unglamorous stuff. The American Planning Association defines it as a profession that works to improve the welfare of people and their communities by creating more convenient, equitable, healthful, efficient, and attractive places. That's the mission statement version. In practice, it's a lot of zoning codes and public hearings where people yell about parking minimums.
The thing that makes everyone furious.
The thing that makes everyone furious. And I should say — I said this recently, but it bears repeating here because it's literally the foundation of this whole conversation. The history of American urban planning is essentially paying for decisions made in the nineteen fifties. That's not an exaggeration. The interstate highway act of nineteen fifty-six, the federal housing administration redlining maps, the single-family zoning that swept the country — those decisions from seventy years ago are the substrate everything today sits on.
When Daniel asks who these planners are and what their backgrounds look like — I'm guessing it's not one thing.
It's surprisingly varied. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this. There are about forty-one thousand urban and regional planners in the United States as of the most recent count. The typical entry-level education is a master's degree — usually a Master of Urban Planning, or a Master of City and Regional Planning. But the undergraduate backgrounds are all over the map.
All over the map. I see what you did.
But really — geography, economics, political science, architecture, civil engineering, environmental science, public policy, sociology. Some come from landscape architecture. A few come from law. I've met planners who started in public health, which makes perfect sense when you think about how zoning determines whether someone lives next to a highway or a park.
Do most major cities actually have them? I feel like the answer is yes but the interesting part is how they're organized.
Every major city in the developed world has a planning department. Every single one. Tokyo's Bureau of Urban Development. London's planning system routed through the boroughs and the Greater London Authority. Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority, which is arguably the most powerful planning body on the planet — they control literally every square meter of land. In the US, you've got planning departments in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston —
The city that famously doesn't have zoning.
And this is where it gets interesting. Houston doesn't have a zoning code, but it absolutely has planners. They regulate through subdivision ordinances, parking requirements, setback rules, deed restrictions. They do planning without calling it zoning. The idea that Houston is some libertarian free-for-all is mostly a myth. They've just built a different set of handcuffs.
The question isn't really whether cities have planners. It's what kind of planning ideology they're operating under. Which brings us to Daniel's real question — why can't we just let cities develop organically? What breaks if you do that?
So let me give you the honest answer first, and then I'll give you the counter-argument, because the counter-argument deserves real respect. The honest answer is that pure organic development, at scale, produces certain predictable failures. Not because people are stupid, but because individual rational decisions don't automatically sum to a functional city.
Give me a concrete example.
If you let a city develop lot by lot with no coordination, nobody builds the trunk sewer line first. Everyone digs their own septic system or their own little drainage ditch, and then a hundred years later you've got cholera outbreaks and a nightmare retrofit problem. The Romans understood this. They planned aqueducts before the neighborhoods filled in. That's not top-down tyranny — it's recognizing that some infrastructure has to precede development or it becomes impossibly expensive to add later.
There's a sequencing problem. The things that make a city functional have to be built in the right order, and individual landowners won't spontaneously coordinate that.
Roads are the same. Nobody's going to voluntarily set back their building thirty feet from the property line just in case the city might want to widen the street someday. But if everyone builds right up to the edge, you end up with medieval street widths in a world of fire trucks and buses. Barcelona's old city is charming but you can't get an ambulance through half of it.
Then there's the pollution thing. The tannery next to the well.
The classic negative externality. Your leather tanning business is profitable, the wastewater goes into the ground, my well is fifty feet away, my kids get sick. The market price of your leather doesn't include the cost of my sick kids. That's a textbook case for land-use separation — which is what zoning, at its best, is supposed to address.
At its best. At its worst, it's something else.
At its worst, it's racial and economic segregation dressed up as public health. And that's not me being dramatic. The Supreme Court case that struck down explicit racial zoning, Buchanan versus Warley in nineteen seventeen — cities just pivoted to economic zoning and single-family districts that achieved the same thing through different means. The planners of the early twentieth century were often quite explicit about this. The American Institute of Planners' own journal published articles about keeping "incompatible" populations separate.
The organic development crowd looks at that history and says — your cure was worse than the disease. The planning profession has a body count.
And that's the argument that deserves respect. Jane Jacobs made it brilliantly in nineteen sixty-one — The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She argued that the planned city was deadening, that the organic messiness of Greenwich Village produced more safety, more economic vitality, more actual community than any master-planned development ever had. She was right about a lot of it.
She was also fighting Robert Moses, who was basically using planning as a bulldozer buffet. Whole neighborhoods erased for expressways.
The Cross Bronx Expressway. Seven lanes, completed in nineteen sixty-three, cut straight through functioning neighborhoods and displaced thousands of families. Moses had the power to do that because planning, in the wrong hands, isn't just coordination — it's a weapon. And that's the tension at the heart of this whole profession. Is the planner a steward or a sovereign?
I think that's the right way to frame it. And it also explains why planner backgrounds are so varied. If you think the job is technical — sewers and traffic flow — you hire engineers. If you think the job is political — negotiating between competing interests — you hire people with policy and law backgrounds. If you think the job is design, you hire architects.
The profession has been fighting about this since its founding. The first university planning program in the US was at Harvard in nineteen twenty-three. It was housed in the landscape architecture department. That tells you something about who was driving it — designers who thought cities should be beautiful, ordered, comprehensive. By the nineteen sixties, planning programs had largely moved into public policy schools. The technocratic optimism of the post-war era had curdled, and the new generation was more interested in community participation and social justice.
Community participation which, I have to say, often means whoever shows up to the Tuesday night zoning board meeting. Which is not exactly representative democracy.
This is one of the great pathologies of modern planning. The public hearing process selects for the people with the most free time and the strongest objections. Retirees who don't want anything to change. Homeowners terrified that an apartment building will lower their property values. The people who would benefit from new housing — renters, future residents, young people — they're not in the room. So "community input" often becomes a mechanism for incumbent homeowners to block everything.
That's how you get the California housing crisis. Decades of "community input" producing exactly nothing.
It's not the whole story but it's a huge part of it. California's Housing Accountability Act, which the state keeps strengthening because cities keep ignoring it, is basically Sacramento telling local planning departments: you don't get to say no anymore. The state is overriding local control because local control produced a statewide catastrophe.
Let me loop back to Daniel's organic development question with that in mind. The "let cities grow organically" position — is the real argument that we should abolish zoning entirely? Or is it that we should replace discretionary planning with simple, predictable rules?
That's exactly the right distinction. Almost nobody serious argues for literal no-rules. Even the most libertarian urbanists — the market urbanism crowd — they want rules. They just want them to be simple, predictable, and hard to weaponize. Things like: you can build anything up to four stories as long as it meets fire code. No discretionary review, no design board, no public hearing. Just a building permit.
Japan basically does this.
Japan does this! The entire country operates under a national zoning law with twelve categories. If your proposed building fits the category, you get your permit. There's basically no neighborhood-level veto. And the result is that Tokyo builds more housing every year than all of California. Tokyo added about a hundred and forty thousand housing starts in twenty nineteen. The entire state of California did about a hundred and ten thousand. Tokyo has a third of the population.
Tokyo is not some dystopian concrete hellscape. People love living there. It's clean, it's safe, the transit works.
It's one of the most functional cities on earth. And it got that way not through top-down master planning but through a framework of clear rules that let organic development actually happen. The contrast with American cities, where every project needs to run a gauntlet of discretionary approvals, is stark.
The "organic development" people aren't actually against planning. They're against a specific kind of planning — the discretionary, everything-must-be-negotiated model. And they're arguing that it's that model, not the free market, that produced the worst outcomes.
And I think that's the most productive way to frame this whole debate. The question isn't planning versus no planning. It's what kind of planning. Do you plan by setting clear, general rules and then getting out of the way? Or do you plan by requiring every individual decision to run through a political process?
The political process version is what we have now in most American cities. And it's worth asking how we got here. You mentioned the nineteen fifties earlier.
The nineteen fifties are where the American planning system really crystallized into its current form. The Housing Act of nineteen forty-nine and the Highway Act of nineteen fifty-six were the two big federal interventions. The housing act funded slum clearance — "urban renewal" was the euphemism — and the highway act plowed expressways through the cleared land. The federal government was essentially paying cities to destroy their own neighborhoods.
This was bipartisan. This wasn't some ideological project of one party.
The American Municipal Association, which is now the National League of Cities, lobbied hard for it. Mayors wanted the federal money. The construction unions wanted the jobs. The automobile industry wanted the roads. It was a coalition of everyone who stood to benefit, and the people who stood to lose — predominantly Black and immigrant communities — had almost no political power to stop it.
When people say "let cities develop organically," part of what they're reacting against is that history. The mid-century planning project was so destructive that it discredited the whole idea of top-down planning for a generation.
It gave us Jane Jacobs, who was not a planner — she had no formal training — but who became the most influential urban thinker of the twentieth century almost by accident. She was just a journalist who lived in Greenwich Village and got mad when Robert Moses tried to run a road through Washington Square Park. Her book is basically four hundred pages of arguing that the organic, unplanned city works better than the designed one.
Her "sidewalk ballet" idea. That the messy mix of uses and people on a street produces safety and vitality in a way that a planned plaza never does.
She was drawing on real observation. She noticed that her neighborhood's mixed-use streets — shops on the ground floor, apartments above, people coming and going at all hours — had lower crime rates than the purely residential areas. The "eyes on the street" idea. Shopkeepers who had a stake in keeping the sidewalk safe. Mothers who could watch their kids play from third-floor windows.
Which is a planning insight, ironically. She was making a planning argument against planners.
She was making a planning argument against a particular kind of planner — the master builder who thinks he can design a city from his desk. And she won, culturally. By the nineteen seventies, the top-down urban renewal model was dead. But what replaced it wasn't organic development. It was proceduralism.
Instead of Robert Moses deciding unilaterally, we got a system where every project triggers environmental review, community board hearings, design review committees, historic preservation review, zoning variances, and on and on. The power shifted from the planner's desk to the public hearing. Which sounds democratic. The problem is that it created a system where it's easier to stop something than to build anything.
The veto points multiplied.
Each veto point has its own logic. The environmental review is supposed to protect the environment. The historic review is supposed to protect architectural heritage. The community board is supposed to give residents a voice. Each one individually makes sense. But stacked together, they create a gauntlet that only the most well-capitalized developers can survive. Small projects die. Big developers hire the consultants who know how to navigate the system.
The proceduralist turn didn't actually empower communities. It empowered the people who know how to work the process — or the people who have the time and resources to show up and say no.
This is the great irony of modern American planning. A system that was designed to prevent another Robert Moses ended up creating a different kind of dysfunction. Nothing gets built, housing costs soar, and the only people who can afford to live in the city are the ones who already own property there.
Which brings us to the planner backgrounds question from another angle. If the job has become mostly about managing procedural gauntlets, what does that do to who enters the profession?
It selects for a particular personality type. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the profession is growing at about four percent — about as fast as average. Median pay is around seventy-nine thousand dollars a year. The top employers are local governments, followed by architectural and engineering firms, then state governments, then consulting firms. But the day-to-day work in a municipal planning department is not designing grand visions. It's reviewing site plans for compliance with parking minimums and setback requirements.
Which sounds soul-crushing.
It can be. And I think that's part of why the profession has a morale problem. You go into planning because you want to make great places. You spend your career telling people their deck is three inches too close to the property line. Or you spend it in public hearings where people scream at you about traffic impacts. The burnout rate is high.
Who actually stays in these jobs?
The ones who either develop a thick skin and a sense of humor about it, or the ones who genuinely love the procedural craft. There's a kind of planner who gets deep satisfaction from a well-written zoning ordinance. The code is their creative medium. And honestly, I respect that. A clear, well-designed zoning code is a thing of beauty in its own way. It's just not what most people picture when they think of urban planning.
Most people picture someone standing over a model of a city, moving little buildings around.
The SimCity fantasy. And that version of planning does exist, but it's mostly in the private sector. Large architecture and engineering firms — AECOM, Stantec, Sasaki — they do the big master plans. When a city decides to redevelop its waterfront or build a new transit corridor, they hire a consultant team that includes planners, architects, engineers, landscape architects, and economists. Those projects are closer to the grand vision thing.
Those firms employ people with the exact mix of backgrounds you described earlier. The economist runs the fiscal impact analysis. The engineer designs the stormwater system. The architect draws the buildings. The planner ties it all together and manages the public process.
The public process is often where the grand vision goes to die. I've seen beautiful master plans get whittled down by a thousand small compromises until what's built bears almost no resemblance to what was proposed. The planner's job in that context is as much about managing expectations and building political coalitions as it is about design.
Let me ask you the question I think Daniel is really getting at. If planning is necessary — and I think we've established that some form of it is — but the American model is broken in specific ways, what does a better version look like? What would you tell someone who's frustrated with both the Moses model and the proceduralist model?
I think the best version of planning does three things. First, it sets clear, predictable rules that let most development happen by right — the Japan model. You want to build a four-story apartment building in a neighborhood that's zoned for four-story apartments? Here's your permit. No hearing, no negotiation. Second, it reserves discretionary review for the things that actually have citywide implications — a new stadium, a major industrial facility, something that affects infrastructure capacity. And third, it plans infrastructure proactively rather than reactively.
That third one is underrated. Most American infrastructure planning is responding to development that's already happened. The traffic is already bad, so now we widen the road.
Because we've made it illegal to build the density that would support transit before the transit exists. It's a chicken-and-egg problem that we've solved in the worst possible way — by mandating the chicken and then wondering why the egg never shows up. If you upzone a corridor and build the transit simultaneously, you get development that pays for the transit. If you build single-family zoning and then try to add transit later, the ridership won't support it.
There's an example of this that I think about a lot. The Orange Line corridor.
In the nineteen seventies, when the Washington Metro was being planned, Arlington County made a deliberate decision to concentrate density around the future Metro stations. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor went from low-rise commercial to a string of walkable, mixed-use nodes. The county's tax base exploded, the transit ridership is among the highest in the country, and they didn't have to widen any highways.
That was planning. That wasn't organic. But it also wasn't Moses-style bulldozing. It was a framework that channeled private development rather than replacing it.
That's the sweet spot. Planning as framework, not as blueprint. The blueprint model assumes you can predict what the city will need in fifty years. You can't. The framework model says: we're going to make sure the trunk infrastructure is in place, we're going to set rules that allow density where it makes sense, and then we're going to let thousands of individual decisions fill in the details.
Which is, in a weird way, closer to organic development than what we have now. The current system is so choked with process that nothing organic can happen. You can't just decide to open a corner store in a residential neighborhood because it's illegal. You can't add a unit to your house for your aging parents because the zoning doesn't allow accessory dwelling units.
The accessory dwelling unit thing is a perfect microcosm. For decades, most American cities banned them. You couldn't build a granny flat in your own backyard. California finally legalized them statewide in twenty seventeen, and the results have been dramatic. ADU permits went from a few thousand a year to over twenty thousand. That's organic development that was simply illegal under the old planning regime.
The sky didn't fall. Neighborhood character survived.
Neighborhood character was fine. It turns out that a small apartment over a garage doesn't destroy the fabric of a community.
This is where I land on Daniel's question. We can't just let cities develop organically with no rules at all — the infrastructure coordination problem is real, the externality problem is real. But a huge amount of what American planning does isn't solving those problems. It's preventing organic development from happening at all. And the reform project isn't abolishing planning. It's making planning do its actual job and then get out of the way.
I think that's right. And I'd add that the planner's background matters enormously for whether they see their job that way. If you're trained as an architect, you might have a tendency to want to design everything. If you're trained as an economist, you might be more comfortable with setting rules and letting markets work within them. If you're trained in social work or public health, you might focus more on equity outcomes than on urban form.
The profession is having this argument internally right now. There's a generational shift happening.
Huge generational shift. The planners who came up in the nineteen seventies and eighties were shaped by the backlash against urban renewal. They're suspicious of grand projects, suspicious of developers, focused on process and community voice. The younger planners — the millennials and Gen Z entering the field — they're coming in during a housing crisis of historic proportions. They're looking at the proceduralist model and saying: this isn't working. We need to build things.
The YIMBY movement. Yes In My Backyard.
Which is largely a movement of young urbanists, many of them planners or planner-adjacent, who are arguing that the progressive position on housing should be to build more of it. It sounds obvious but it's been a genuine realignment. For decades, the left-NIMBY alliance was the default — environmentalists and neighborhood activists united against development. That coalition is fracturing.
Because the environmental argument for blocking housing has gotten harder to sustain when the alternative is people driving two hours each way from the exurbs. The carbon footprint of a new apartment building in a transit-accessible neighborhood is a fraction of a single-family house in the sprawl.
The Sierra Club in California has been going through a painful internal debate about this. Some chapters are still reflexively anti-development. Others have recognized that infill housing is one of the most effective climate policies available. The research is pretty clear on this — dense urban living produces dramatically lower per-capita emissions than suburban or rural living, even accounting for the embodied carbon in the building materials.
The environmental review process, which was partly a product of the environmental movement, is now being used to block the exact kind of development that would reduce emissions.
The California Environmental Quality Act — CEQA — is the poster child for this. Enacted in nineteen seventy with the best intentions, it requires environmental review for projects that might have significant impacts. But over the decades, it's been weaponized. Labor unions use it to extract project labor agreements. NIMBYs use it to delay or kill housing projects. Competing businesses use it to block rivals.
There was a case a few years ago where a Berkeley homeowner tried to use CEQA to block new student housing near campus, arguing that the students would be noisy and that noise was an environmental impact.
I remember that one. It didn't succeed, but the fact that it could even be filed tells you something about how far the law has drifted from its original purpose. The procedural gauntlet we talked about — CEQA is one of the biggest veto points in California. And it's not unique. Most states have some version of it. New York has SEQR. The federal government has NEPA.
To be clear — I'm not saying environmental review is bad. I'm saying that when a law designed to protect the environment is being used to prevent dense housing near transit, something has gone wrong.
That's exactly the kind of second-order thinking that the planning profession needs more of. Not just "what does this rule say" but "what does this rule actually produce in the world." And that's hard to do when you're buried in site plan reviews and public hearings.
Let me try to synthesize what we've covered for Daniel. Urban planning is the profession of coordinating land use, infrastructure, and public space to make cities functional. Urban planners come from a wide range of backgrounds — architecture, economics, public policy, engineering, geography, public health — and most have a master's degree. Every major city has them, though the form varies from Tokyo's rule-based system to America's discretionary gauntlet.
The "why can't we let cities develop organically" question — the answer is that some coordination is necessary for infrastructure and externalities, but the American planning system has gone far beyond that. It's become a system of veto points that blocks organic development rather than enabling it. The reform project isn't abolishing planning. It's making planning do less, but do it better.
The framework, not the blueprint.
Framework, not blueprint. Clear rules that let most things happen by right. Discretionary review reserved for things that actually matter at the city scale. Infrastructure planned proactively. And a planning profession that sees its job as enabling good development rather than preventing bad development.
Which is a cultural shift as much as a legal one. You can change the zoning code and still have a planning department that defaults to no.
The code matters, but the people matter more. If the planner behind the counter sees an applicant as an adversary, the rules won't save you. If they see the applicant as someone trying to make the city better, the same rules produce different outcomes.
That's why the background and training of planners isn't just trivia. It shapes the culture of the profession.
And I'll say one more thing about that. The planning profession in America is overwhelmingly white and increasingly disconnected from the communities it's supposed to serve. The American Planning Association's own data shows that the profession doesn't look like the country. When the person making decisions about a neighborhood doesn't know anyone who lives there, the decisions tend to be worse.
That's a whole other episode, honestly. The representation question in planning.
It could be. But the short version is: who plans matters as much as what the plan says.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Take it away.
Hilbert: In the early nineteen hundreds, librarians in Tierra del Fuego preserved newspapers by soaking them in a solution of sheep tallow and crushed sea salt, then burying them in peat bogs during the winter months. The Bog Press Archive survived intact for over sixty years before being discovered by a Chilean cartographic expedition in nineteen sixty-two. The tallow rendered the paper translucent but left the ink perfectly legible.
...right.
I have so many questions and I'm going to ask none of them.
That does it for us. If this episode made you think differently about the zoning board meeting you've been avoiding, maybe go to that meeting. Or maybe just send this episode to your city councilor. This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. Our producer Hilbert Flumingtop makes this whole thing possible. We'll be back with another one soon.
Go build something.
