Today’s reading was pretty interesting. Community planning. People actively getting involved with the direction their neighbourhood will take. My one complaint is that it takes something drastic for people to start getting interested. The first portion of the reading was listing all these protests and uprisings and battles over urban development, when plans and meetings and projects are all public. Consensus planning doesn’t work in practice and I’m not saying people should go for it, but I’m not a fan of protest, especially when there are so many other ways to get something done. It shouldn’t have to take a protest for people’s voices to be heard, mainly because it really doesn’t have to. Urban plans affect the community, but lately it seems that the community is only interested when the world will fall apart. It doesn’t surprise me that plans then serve the purposes of a select few; they’re probably the ones who pushed them in the first place.

Question: What is your opinion of community planning, and the urban planning process?