Town Planning Stuff, Ep. 1: The Benefit of Planning

We’ve now posted Episode 1 of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know on the Dover-Kohl YouTube channel. Subscribe & watch the whole playlist; new episodes are being posted weekly.

The benefit of planning

Ever wonder whether city planning meetings and zoning hearings are a colossal waste of time? They aren’t, as long as your town isn’t just going through the motions. Ask: What do you want your neighborhood to be like? Every community should set out to create its ideal. That means not just talking about it, or writing policies, but making maps, designing the future.

Towns, like people, have to choose what they want to be when they grow up. Every place people love has resulted from some level of planning. Those places didn’t come from the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. If they’re nice places to be, they probably haven’t always been that way. People drew lines on maps, deciding what kind of neighborhood this should be.

All the little decisions matter. So give some of your time to help move planning along in your town.

Planning brings benefits. And that’s #1 on my list of Town Planning Stuff everyone needs to know.

—Victor

New Video Series: Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know

Greetings friends and colleagues! Today, we’re introducing “Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know,” a new playlist on our Dover-Kohl YouTube channel. Please subscribe to the channel! Over a series of super-short videos, we’re going to take a journey into big ideas, about cities, that should matter to everyone, not just the professionals or experts. Watch these and you’ll be a ready citizen planner.

We’ll look at the root purposes of city planning, the importance of design, and designing in public—and, along the way, we’ll visit topics like architecture, street design, downtown revitalization, historic preservation, green building, lowering your neighborhood’s carbon footprint, the public health impacts of the built environment, and setting  your town up for walking, biking, and transit— plus some other surprise topics!

One target audience is the time-stressed, easily-distracted local elected official! So the videos are very quick, bite-size intros to best practices and key breakthroughs. Tell your mayor or councilperson to take a look, even if it’s just for one or two minutes at a time.

We’ve mounted an at-the-office and at-home team effort to create the first season of episodes, with Kenneth García, Pablo Dueñas and my daughter Theresa Lee helping film, animate and edit sequences, and my son Thomas composing and performing original background music. So, welcome to Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know! Share the clips, and let me know what you think.

—Victor Dover