February 6, 2021 AZAPA Webblast

ASU STUDENT PLANNING ASSOCIATION
FEBRUARY 4, 2021
2. Plan for places that last – the most well-loved places are those that have been left for
generations to leave their mark and adapt spaces to new needs. Encourage construction and place
design that emphasizes longevity and durability to create places that people can love and enjoy.
3. Plan prescriptively, not proscriptively – plan active to create the types of places that will serve
the community and allow people to thrive.
4. Build the humble city – the loveliest places are often at a very small scale, and at a human scale
where people linger and choose to inhabit a space. Encourage human-scale design, and remember
that the most effective and beloved places are often not the shiniest or most perfected parts of a city,
but are the ones where everyday people have a say in shaping the environment around them.
5. Ensure sustainability – if sustainability is ensuring that a place can be passed off to the next
generation, the one beyond our own, there are few things more loving than stewarding sustainable
places. Prioritize long-term environmental, social, and economic health, even in the face of shortterm
gains.
6. Reclaim space – Mark Bjelland, author of Good Places for All, describes reclaiming neglected
public spaces as a way to inject love back into them. Celebrate neglected spaces and provide
people with opportunities to write a new future for them.
This is not some “kum-ba-yah” version of love, driven by sentimental ideas of loving a place and buying into
imaginations of our cities that are at best stereotypical and at worst untrue. This is a real wrestling with the
question of why we plan and why we do any planning work at all. I think to build the sustainable and lifegiving
places of tomorrow, it is going to start when us planners take the lead and love the places that we
plan.
And as a young planner and graduate student, I am a firm believer that this is one of the only paths forward
to avoid cynicism and despair in the face of the difficult work of planning.