Wicked Problems in Urban Planning

Planning is much more complex than what people are led to believe. When you introduce yourself to someone you do not tell them everything about yourself, but as they get to know you then they learn more traits. Getting to learn things about your peers really shows you who they are. I think that it’s important to know people in order to know if you would get along with them and work well with them. It is very interesting to get to learn further and discover new things about your peers that you would not have before known. Just like I have learned in planning, if you do not really understand that project and area you are working with it will be impossible to plan and set everything out. I know that people have complexity to them, just like planning does it is just important that you dig a little deeper. Once you get past the surface, things have more dimension.

I think this relates to ‘wicked problems’, I found this very interesting because they are real world problems that cause a lot of thinking to solve and deal with. To me, wicked problems seem very scary because they seem like problems we have no control over and they just start to happen. This can mean it is hard to deal with and it can really change our community, area, or population. This is similar to introducing ourselves because there are underlying pieces of every single person that we do not know about. There are also underlying pieces of planning that we have to dig deeper to better understand so we can solve to the best of our ability. What I have learned, is that planning is very complex and not everyone sees that. There are lots of aspects under the surface that you need to learn how to handle and that is when you can really understand.

‘Wicked problems’ can be prevalent in urban and city planning. It is also something that seems so real and something that can really make a difference and change a community. A lot of things I think students learn as they grow up that there are things they do not know how to apply to real world situations but everything I have learned about urban and city planning has made me think about how it could affect a surrounding community and the people in that area. Urban and city planning is something in I think planners circle back to a lot. I think it really shows just how planners work and how they think and what exactly a planning job can entail. It is something that may seem very simple but what I have learned in the past few weeks is it is actually very complex, coming back to ‘wicked problems’.

Something that really stuck out to me about urban planning was the mini projects we got to plan. I thought it was very interesting all the different ideas people had and how creative they were. My group came up with improving a neighborhood instead of building more, by feeding the homeless population and having more events in the park for the residents of that neighborhood. These kinds of things seem so simple and easy to plan but as a planner they are not easy to accomplish without the help and support of the surrounding community, it’s near impossible. It is important to not just change a community without their consent. These plans directly affect those people and if it is not something they want then it is pointless and a waste of time to put time, energy, and money into. These different aspects of planning within cities and urban areas are topics I have found very interesting.

Planning an actual community and putting something into motion takes quite a bit of effort. Without the models we learned about, the rational model, the middle range model, and collaborative rationality it would be near impossible. The idea of comprehensiveness, learning from others who have solved problems, and analysis planning something from nothing would be impossible. Urban and city planning is something that requires a lot of attention, effort, and creativity, so without that willingness to solve ‘wicked problems’, they will never be solved or planned. These different models cover so many different types of ways of solving planning problems. They help to deal with the people effected, the experts, and they are very comprehensive. Overall, planning and ‘wicked problems’ go hand in hand and although sometimes at times can seem impossible, they are far from that.