I wanted to give readers a broad-brush introduction to the world of town planning and the tools and methods that are used to develop and execute projects. Not many people really know what planners are or what they do. I've had people ask me if I meant I was a "planter" and what exactly did I grow. Another person asked what types of parties I planned. Worse than that, once I explained that planners are professionals who work on making communities better places by using tools like master plans, zoning, and subdivision regulations, the eyes often glaze over and they move on to another person at the party.
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| Source: www.inc.com |
Planning as a profession can be in private practice, working for an architectural or engineering practice or on their own, but most town planners work for the public sector as a city or town planner. In many cases, small town planners work alone without professional or full-time administrative staff. Larger communities have one or more professional staff members who often work on specific areas like housing, the environment, or transportation. Many planners are also economic development professionals and are recently adding sustainability to their task lists.
Town Planning is a profession with its roots in several threads of historical civic improvement including the physical realm, public health, and the social sphere. Physical planning emanated from the great architects and landscape architects such as L’Enfant, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles Eliot, and scores of others who laid out great cities such as Paris, Washington DC, Savannah as well as new towns, parks, or neighborhoods such as Riverside, Letchworth, Welwyn, and Radburn. These pioneers had progressive and utopian ideals and gave less consideration to the needs of people and were more interested in building beautiful, legacy cities with great parks, squares, and buildings.
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| Riverside General Plan, Source: www.riverside.il.us |
Rampant disease in crowded cities led public health professionals to address issues of pollution and sanitation that was overwhelming the public with cholera, emphysema, and a host of other afflictions emanating from the lack of sewers, contaminated public water supplies, garbage handling, and air and water pollution.
Social workers like Jacob Riis and Jane Addams sought to improve the lives of the people living in overcrowded tenements, lacking parks and open spaces, light and fresh air. Each of these professions contributed a foundational element to the planning profession which emerged near the turn of the 20th century with the recognition that our towns and cities needed to be more comprehensively planned for the future of our communities. As the profession emerged and grew throughout the 20th century, focus areas such as land use, transportation, the economy, housing, the environment, and others were incorporated into the modern profession seen today. While you may not know many (or any) prominent planning professionals today, you most certainly know their work, particularly if you've been to Seaside, FL; Mashpee Commons; Forest Hills Gardens, NY; or several overseas Guggenheim museums.
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| Forest Hills Gardens Source: www.apa.org |
Professional planners receive their education within
accredited Master’s Degree programs and are certified by the American Institute
of Certified Planners (AICP) via experience and training that must be continued
throughout a career. In addition, AICP certified professional planners must
abide by a strict code of ethics that is lengthy set of principles and
procedural requirements that must be maintained. This code requires us to
fulfill, among many other provisions, a responsibility to the public interest
that includes concern for the rights of others, social justice, and protection
and preservation of the environment.
In today’s world, planners are often fully occupied with applications for site plans, special permits, subdivisions, and other project reviews that leave little time for the creative and interesting work of long-range planning, for thinking about the future and how they can address the more complicated and sometimes conflicting issues facing our communities such as balancing needed growth with protection of open spaces, historical character, housing needs, and the environment. Yet in Harvard, we are fortunate to have very few of those applications compared to neighboring towns, and while our resources for working toward future goals are limited, we are blessed with a number of committed citizen volunteers to lead on these efforts. One key group in that realm is the Harvard Planning Board, made up of six members (five voting and one alternate) dedicated to carrying out long range planning and other duties as noted in the Code of the Town of Harvard. The Board, established in 1952, is served by my position and a very valuable Administrative Assistant who keeps everything glued together. The primary set of policy recommendations guiding the Planning Board in conducting long-range planning is the Master Plan. Harvard’s current Master Plan was adopted in 2016 and contains a vision for the future of Harvard as well as goals and an action plan for carrying out the vision. Their primary day to day tool for carrying out decision making is the Protective (Zoning) Bylaw. Harvard's first zoning bylaw was adopted by Town Meeting in 1951. Since that time, the Protective Bylaw has been refined numerous times to reflect changing opportunities and methods, threats or issues, or fundamental flaws in the language. In many cases, these amendments were sponsored by the Planning Board or Zoning Board of Appeals, because they are on the front lines of the application of the Bylaws and see first hand the issues that arise.
I'll conclude by asking citizens to attend Planning Board meetings and see first hand the issues they discuss and the sometimes difficult decisions they must make. It will certainly give you an opportunity to see how "the sausage is made" because even seemingly simple Bylaw amendments take quite a long time to craft, edit, and refine. As a professional who has served many planning boards in over 30 years, I will say this is one of the best groups of citizen planners I have ever worked with and Harvard is lucky to have them. So get to know them and perhaps one day we can get you to serve!
