He calls his interview in Toronto a “positive experience;” even so, he was smart to go back to Lotusland, where he works as a planner in the private sector, and as president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism.and:
What on earth do urban planners do in the private sector? Why and how does private sector urban planning even exist? How can a private company plan a city? Doesn't urban planning inherently need to be done by the people with jurisdiction over planning the city?Councillor Adam Vaughan (Trinity-Spadina), a noted planning wonk, says Toronto’s lack of investment in its planning department turns off applicants.
“Every good young planner jumps ship because it’s better pay, better hours and more respect from clients if they work in the private sector.”
It seems to me that private-sector urban planning would be analogous to a company whose business model is to barge in and tell people how they should renovate their houses. But, since these things exist, clearly I'm missing something. Can anyone explain to me why and how private-sector urban planning exists?
5 comments:
I'm one of those private sector urban planners who used to work for the City of Toronto. I have two major client bases.
The first are public sector clients (towns, cities). My work there involves planning studies for infrastructure projects and community plans. Most municipalities can't afford to maintain large staffs of planners to do that work anymore, so it gets farmed out to consultants.
My second type of client is private landowners/developers. My work for them involves site planning and impact assessment of proposed developments.
I was going to guess this answer. Great to get it from someone who knows what he's talking about.
That's interesting, thanks Paul! I think I had a too-narrow interpretation of what "urban planning" meant. I thought it meant planning the whole city rather than just individual developments, and I thought it mean only planning, not doing the impact assessments and such. (I hadn't gotten as far as thinking about who actually does the impact assessments.)
The private sector also pays really well if not better. It is just that. Plain and simple.
Obviously the private sector would pay well. The private sector nearly always pays better than the public sector for high-end jobs, not to mention that this was explicitly stated in the original article. The question, until Paul came along with his explanation, was why the private sector even had the possibility of being involved in urban planning in the first place.
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