I find that a lot of people new to urban planning are just sort of… floating around it, instead of actually practicing it. If you’re reading about walkability and density and mixed use and public space and so on, you’re not practicing. Reading is definitely educational, but it’s not the same as looking at some places, comparing them, drawing out changes, and critiquing them. And it makes a big difference! If you don’t have concrete exercises to do, all the concepts eventually start to feel a bit mashed up together. If you give yourself a little task to do that results in something you can see on a piece of paper, it’s much easier to see how you’re getting better, and much easier to see where your analysis is a bit lacking.
Here’s one way to start: pick a single planning concept, and think about it in a single real place. Pick something simple, like block size, or street frontage, or pedestrian access. Look at a site plan for a real place, and trace over it with a pencil. Highlight or circle the ways that the place supports the concept, and shade in or cross out the ways it doesn’t. Then write a couple of sentences about how that concept affected the place. Does it pull movement smoothly across the block, or does it create dead corners and awkward gaps? This is important, because the point of this exercise isn’t just to learn vocabulary. The point is to understand how physical arrangements affect the way places are used, and how they make people feel. One pitfall here is that a lot of people focus on things that are visually attractive.
They redraw grid street patterns, or sketch elegant site plans, but they don’t think much about whether those things actually solve a problem. The picture may look nice, but their planning analysis isn’t actually improving. To avoid this, give yourself a specific problem to solve every time you sit down to draw. Maybe you’re trying to make a street corner work better with a public square. Maybe you’re trying to reduce the conflict between turning cars and walking paths. Maybe you’re trying to get the buildings along a street to define a clearer edge. If you have a problem to solve, you’ll find that your revisions actually mean something. You’re not just drawing a pretty picture.
You’re testing an idea to see if it really works. Here’s an example of a quick twenty-minute exercise you can do. Spend the first five minutes looking at a map of your town and choosing a location to work with, and a problem you want to tackle. Spend the next seven minutes tracing the existing condition of the place, using simple, legible lines. Spend the next five minutes drawing a change you think would help, even if it’s rough. And spend the last three minutes writing a few sentences comparing the before and after sketches. What did you improve? What still needs some work? What should you come back to tomorrow and try again?
These little exercises, done regularly, will give you far more planning judgment than waiting for a long, perfect session that never quite begins. When you get frustrated, it can be tempting to just go read something big and theoretical instead. But don’t give in to that temptation. Instead, go back to the place you were working on, and narrow your focus a little further. If you were trying to get a whole block to work, just focus on the entrances for a bit. If you were trying to get the circulation to work, ignore the buildings and just focus on the paths for a bit.
If you were trying to get a public space to work, ignore the inside of the space and just focus on the edges for a bit. Narrowing your focus isn’t a cop-out. It’s a strategy to deal with complexity without feeling overwhelmed. Urban planning can feel a lot more manageable when each exercise focuses on one thing, tries one idea, and results in something you can look at again with fresh eyes another time.
