Radical Advice for Early Career Planners

Being a planner is hard. Being a planner who wants to help communities rather than capital is harder. I didn’t leave grad school with any depth of understanding of radical planning. Typically, it’s something you have to figure out on your own, both through work experience and personal education.

I want to help leftist planners who are early in their career adopt a radical planning framework. In this video, I’m giving the advice I wish I had been given a decade ago. I’m joined by two planners in the radical tradition through interviews I conducted in August, 2023. I hope their advice is inspiration to you. The resources they provided should also be a big help for your personal education, linked below.

This video is giving “planner” but I do think these lessons are valuable for anyone who works with or organizes communities. Thanks for watching!

(site may be under construction on video's release)

And Progressive City and the Planners Network here:

[wafford]

I just want to say how much I appreciate there being a radical voice like yours in this neoliberal "urbanists" YouTube movement.

[ApplAsdf]

This is the kind of content we need in urbanist spaces if we are actually ever going to address the problems urbanists claim to want to fix. It was nice to get a more in depth discussion than just „engage with your community“ thats typical in the online urbanist community. Awesome video.

[RebekahMarkillie]

i’m a housing organizer and a communist who is seriously considering grad school for urban planning. i have to say thank you so much for making these videos. while low key depressing to hear that planning might be obsolete very soon, i truly believe that organizing + planning are essential to liberation and i still want to learn planning skills.

[daniellebalouise]

Kinda funny how society trains us to think that being polite and smiling equates earning someone's trust. Something I've repeatedly experienced in the homeless sector is that any time you show rebellion, pain, frustration, meltdowns, outbursts, expressions of the trauma you're experiencing - providers and supports will chide you, saying they're always polite to you, and they'll talk to you when you're calm, cuz they've never done anything to you.

I strongly advocate for a restructuring of the system that allows relationships to be built and trust earned, by focusing on a low-case load and the relationship building. I feel like this model could pivot the system towards a more organic and healthy society. The problem, of course, is that the system has no interest in this focus. It's not money generating. It doesn't encourage people to do everything they're asked to do, because the worker is able to say, "No, I have something else that provides more balance in my life. I won't meet your pace or expectation for the sake of your bottom line."

The more time that goes on, the more disgusted I get with the whole RE sector. I feel like the people w/money, in positions of influence (powerful influence) are hypocrites that actively disseminate disinformation - and sometimes I think they provide disinfo cuz they simply don't see anything outside of their own perspective. I saw a RE investor get mad that individuals may rent instead of sell their secondary house, saying they're stupid idiots who won't make profit and will lose money, while they actively invest in property ownership and landlordism.

I've seen people in the RE sphere on twitter just outright lie, and argue for their lies. It's shocking, really, and I find it confusing that they would say such blatantly untrue things, like cars 40 years ago died at 50k miles ("and that's why cars today are better so capitalism today is great and the costs of things are fine cuz they're better now").

Think I kind of trailed off the

[JoeAudino]

Good stuff! The Angotti-edited "Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City" is my reading list, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I did go back and re-read Lake's "Rethinking NIMBY" and there really are some bangers in there (e.g. "It is politically easier to castigate community opposition to affordable housing than to re-examine a political economy that perpetuates poverty so that we have to create places for poor people to live"). It's also interesting to revisit with the additional context of Lake's 2021 IJURR piece "YIMBYism Then and Now."

[stellaf.]

ILYSM i am graduating soon and your channel has been everything for me, there isnt enough political discourse in planning and it causes us to miss larger contexts and limit ourselves repeatedly.

[theonegopher]

im a city planner resisting the massive urge to share this video to my linkedin but thank you so much for being the one planning youtuber putting this perspective out there!!!

[KLCChannel]

I just found your channel and as someone who recently stumbled into Transportation Planning from Anthropology/Archaeology this is super interesting/useful. Thank you for making this video!

[cw]

Revisiting this and damn Sabrina is so spot on in everything 🔥 thanks again for great guests and a great video!

[coreywittenwyler]

Extremely timely video as I'm about to graduate in December.

[auklin]

I was hoping you would cover how to get into this field to begin with. What types of positions give you the best advantages, etc.

[cjaquilino]

@Radical Planning how does a radical planning approach meet with the #LandBack movement?

[urbaneblobfish]

can you do a video on books or education resources on urban planning? Specially for if I’m looking to see if it’s something I’m interested in or wanting to learn more about

[bltxlettuce]

Environmental science major who accidentally just ended up in professional planning in Pennsylvania, do you have any resources or case studies for good design in PA or elsewhere?

[theclassicalrepublican]

This is really great. Would you be interested in doing an interview on my channel?