This morning my friend Mackenzie Keast – who is famous and was on the radio in Toronto today talking about The Laneway Project – sent me an interesting article from the Guardian talking about the marginalization and growing irrelevance of city planners. It’s called: For the sake of our cities, it’s time to make town planning cool again.
The gist of the article is as follows:
While the cult of the star architect has soared over the decades and property developers have displaced bankers as the new super-rich, the figure of the local town planner has become comic shorthand for a certain kind of faceless, under-whelming dullard.
But what really stood out for me are the following two things. First, that people are genuinely interested in cities. I would say that it’s almost trendy to be into cities these days.
Urbanism may have displaced cultural theory as the favoured subject of the academic hipster, but talented young men and women rarely consider becoming town planners.