Planning and a desire to "change the world":

[jread]

I am just wondering if part of the appeal of planning is that you get to "leave your mark" on the world? It would seem that there aren't many jobs where you get to do this, as usually one is creating a product of some sort that will eventually be outdated. With planning, though, you can very realistically do something that changes the face of the city, then drive around 20-years later and say, "See that? I was responsible for making it look that way."

I don't know if this is entirely realistic but I imagine that there are plenty of similar examples. It seems that this would be one of the largest sources of job satisfaction... for me anyway.

[btrage]

I'm not so sure that I want to "leave my mark", so much as I just want to make our cities/towns/etc. better places to live. That being said, the ego in all of us is happy when they can point to a good thing and say "I did that"

I think that planners truly love what they do, more so than many professions.

[jread]

I'm not so sure that I want to "leave my mark", so much as I just want to make our cities/towns/etc. better places to live. That being said, the ego in all of us is happy when they can point to a good thing and say "I did that"

I think that planners truly love what they do, more so than many professions.

Yes, I definitely think that improving the places we live is most important. I guess the "I did that" is a nice benefit as well

[vaughan]

There's definitely a significant degree of satisfaction involved in positively impact your community. Undoubtably.

On the flip side, I also drive around my community and say "that's a violation that i should work on". "That's a building that got built illegally, and then i had to deal with the flak when I called them on it". "That's a subdivision that got built and they didn't entirely tell the truth on how they satisfied their conditions, and now i've got to enforce something". "That's a development that never should have been approved but was." If you can't tell, that's been how i've been feeling lately.

I guess the point is that, with planning, you can have a lot of emotion wrapped up in a place, both positive and negative, and you've got to learn to be able to have a level of professional detachment with it all.

[otterpop]

On the flip side, I also drive around my community and say "that's a violation that i should work on". "That's a building that got built illegally, and then i had to deal with the flak when I called them on it". "That's a subdivision that got built and they didn't entirely tell the truth on how they satisfied their conditions, and now i've got to enforce something". "That's a development that never should have been approved but was." If you can't tell, that's been how i've been feeling lately.

These thoughts are common to all planners. Once you become a planner, wherever you go you see violations. Others see a lovely house. You see a house possibly built in the setbacks or maybe in the floodplain. A friend mentions they built an addition to their home and you wonder "did they amend their DEQ approval?" More than once someone has mentioned something they did that is probably a violation and I've turned a deaf ear to it because I didn't want to tick off one of my wife's friends.

My goal is hopefully to make the county a better place as it grows that it would have been without my efforts. Protect the rights of the developer and his neighbors and keep the county out of the soup. Some days I do better than others. C'est la vie.

[jread]

I guess the point is that, with planning, you can have a lot of emotion wrapped up in a place, both positive and negative, and you've got to learn to be able to have a level of professional detachment with it all.

I pretty much have no emotions at all, so emotional detachment is quite easy for me

[jaws]

Everybody changes the world a little bit by the actions they choose. You chose your part of the world to change, but you could have chosen something else.