The field of planning, although interesting and important, is not the most glamorous profession in the world. Most planners in industrialized countries work in local governments or consulting settings to process the current and long-range planning tasks of the local governments. The current planning mainly involves the entitlement process and it is characterized by intensive customer contacts. Long-range planning primarily focuses on creating land use guidelines and articulating several other planning objectives that include the topics of economic development, transportation, environment and infrastructure. Sustainability and environmental objectives have increasingly become overarching objectives of any long-range planning efforts. In the industrialized nations, both current and long-range planning goes through numerous public consultations and hearings before they are finally approved or adopted. This democratic and transparent process helps create optimum balance in serving public interest but the time taken and the controversy often generated could be a nightmare for developers, financiers and planners alike.
In industrialized nations, even though the planning process can sometimes be contentious and controversial, the approved development projects are implemented efficiently resulting into orderly and organized projects. For example, the Matthew Henson Homes Project in Phoenix, Arizona, faced contentious planning process lasting more than three years but once it was approved for implementation, the development is being completed at a rapid rate.
Developing Country Planners – A Mixed Task
In developing countries, planners routinely deal with slums, squatters and low-income housing and overburdened infrastructure. Additionally, they often have to work within a corrupt political system and an inefficient bureaucracy.
Planners are often pre-occupied with working on low-income housing projects, as the majority of their urban population lives in slums. Additionally, politicians routinely derive their votes from the slum and squatter dwellers and they keep planners and bureaucrats busy to accommodate the housing concerns of the poor, a reliable vote bank for the local politicians.
Developing country planners are active in planning for the basic infrastructure in the cities: Drinking water, solid and liquid waste disposal and urban roads, which always top urban priorities. While their counterparts in industrialized world may be occupied with administering zoning, containing urban sprawl and optimizing sub-divisions, planners in the developing countries are engaged in the provisions of basic necessities of urban life. Although developed country planners are also concerned with achieving fairness, providing affordable housing and ensuring citizen input in controversial projects, their role is more on problem analysis, advocacy and in maintaining a balance between growth and equity.
On the other hand, planners in developing countries deal with immediate problems, almost as day-to-day crisis management of an overburdened urban system and inadequate infrastructure. Even in the midst of these daunting challenges, developing country planners are also increasingly pushing sustainable practices.
In developing countries, public consultation and public hearing of plans and policies is sometimes just a façade. Many planning decisions are made administratively, which are often influenced by backroom political pressures. This is an area where the developing country governments, policymakers and planners can learn from the practices in industrialized nations, particularly in North America.
Even when a plan or a planning project is finally approved, the implementation of development projects faces formidable challenges in developing countries. Problems related to resources, funding, materials and infrastructure routinely delay development. Individual builders often build their own projects in an organic fashion that routinely result in haphazard growth.
Planning Career – A Balancing Act
In spite of differences in their focus and emphasis, planners everywhere face similar problems in their work. They have to maintain a balance between the elected officials’ need for political expediency, ever present resource constraints and citizen expectations and preferences while attempting to maintain a healthy urban economy, high quality of life and above all economic, environmental and social sustainability. Further, planning problems are never well-defined as they deal with the complexities created by the ever-changing societal needs, preferences, personal tastes, market and economic forces and conflicting interests among various stakeholders. Working in such an environment, with a modest pay is difficult, and planners routinely experience a “planner’s fatigue and burn out” from their work.
Although regularly burdened by low pay, lack of glamour and a challenging work environment, planning remains an interesting profession, and both in developing countries and the industrialized world, planning schools continue to attract many committed and interested students.
Life After Planning
Many planners branch off to related jobs that are not directly planning and some planners altogether quit the profession and become full-time parents, travelers or even farmers.
In developing countries, many planners have joined politics, other governmental departments or have ventured into businesses often related to real estate. Planners who have remained in the pure planning practice have learnt to deal with the work by getting involved in the community affairs, by writing, taking up travels and taking pleasure in the results of the large and small impacts they are able to make on the society. Many practicing planners find it relaxing to frequently teach planning courses in universities and also to get involved in the many environmental causes. On many instances, planners have become ardent environmentalists, deriving a sense of purpose in the complex field they try to operate.
Writer is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, USA and Regional Coordinator of Non-Resident Nepali Association for the Americas
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