I'm trained as an architect but I'm working as an urban designer, and there are real planners on my team. So it works the other way around too. Many architectural firms have urban design business units, and many of those units employ planners as well as designers. So, in theory, the answer is 'yes.' The practical reality now, though, is that most architecture firms are having a really really hard time staying afloat, so they may not be doing much hiring at all.. architects, planners, window washers, or anybody else. Hiring freezes are nearly ubiquitous and if you're following the layoffs-thread, you'd see that a lot of people are srinking.

From what my planner-friends are telling me, the market for planners (working for planning practices and state, Federal or municipal agencies) is a LOT better than the market for architects, overall. If the stimulus infrastructure programs kick in, there will be a lot of work for planners, but not necessarily for architects.

From my perspective as a designer, our end of the building industry is in tough shape now. There are still jobs available, but in most cities they are few and far between, with hundreds of applicants per job. So if I were you I'd stick to planning while you wait out the recession. If its job security you want, architecture firms just aren't the place to be right now.

that sounds like good advice.

we work regularly with a planner on our projects. i have a different perspective than him because i was trained as architect and he as planner, but i very much like the opposing vision. my partner who is architect was trained under adrian geuze so has broad vision of planning and landscape design as well as architecture and he is great bridge between points of view.

i would recommend all architects work with planners. it makes our work much stronger. no doubt about that at all.

whether you can find many firms that would agree with that point of view i can't say. good luck.

Thanks. I think I may give planning another chance. Also, from most of you being much more active and vocal about your profession, I realized that entry level planners fresh out of college make more money than 5 year veteran architects.

I suppose one issue I have with planning is most of the communities and cities that can afford planning tend to be affluent suburbs. These people have an idea of what they want but the stark reality that comes with what they want is something that they don't want. So far, I'm trying to be more vocal about the necessity of generational planning-- that is, developing and situating development in a way that's more friendly to a variety of age ranges.

Most communities want "family" to be pivotal in their community design. There's a few problems with this: families are a minority, families needs change quite drastically once children need to spend time outside of the house and how do you retain a family when your community no longer provides opportunities for young adults? This is what kills me the most. The perception of family-friendly only works for a very limited time while a family is relatively young. Past that, these family-friendly suburbs actually tend to rip families apart as they age and gives communities very little in the opportunity of population retention.

There's all of this plus the last 150 years of history. As much as people say times change, if individuals from the past transformed those ideas into permanent physical objects then those ideas manifest themselves permanently. This is a big problem for communities is so few of them realize that uncle tom and jim crow still haunt many American communities. It may not be on the law books or exist but they are ghosts in a sense none the less.

These concepts just don't hurt the people they were intended to hurt but they hurt everyone who fits financially or culturally the demographics of the people they were intended to hurt.

This is essentially my beef with the planning profession and why I was looking outside of it. Well, that and green technology has perverted everything to a point to where everyone looks past increased density, street grid concurrency and proper built environments as a cornerstone to achieving sustainability.

Planning firms are a lot like architectural firms-- neither advertise much of anything and past the flashy graphics and some gregarious titles, it's hard to assume what goes on behind closed doors.

The difference in my mind between "Architecture" and "Planning" is one of scale. Architects essentially plan a building, while Planners plan something at a much larger scale, a city, town.. development, where individual buildings are a part of the whole.

I have worked in offices that have a formal business arm that deals with planning and offices that are more informal about how they integrate people who are planners or specialized in planning. It depends upon each individual office and how they work and what types of projects they typically go after.

I also couldn't tell from your self-description, but you mentioned "college... do you have an accredited graduate degree in planning? An MCP or MUP seems to be the accepted entry level credential these days, and AICP certification, in large measure, seems to really prefer accredited graduate degrees. It shouldn't matter and isn't much of a reflection on your skillset, but many planning employers seem to be looking for certified professionals from accredited programs.

I'm do not have an accredited degree. Even if I had a full B.A. in Urban Planning, the college itself never admitted or told their students the program wasn't bona-fide.

Masters or not, AICP requires at least two years of full-time experience-- no volunteering, no teaching, no other method of being able to sit for the exam. Depending on where you go for master's, if it's under a college devoted to architecture... you don't learn the economic development portion which most employers also want.

I actually volunteer for the APA and do the certification maintenance for my region-- which is LOLworthy considering I probably shouldn't be doing it. However, I tend to know more than the planners I help certify and maintain as most of them are clueless when it comes to current issues.

There's this paradox in planning that, masters or not, all entry level jobs require at least two years experience (they never say in what) and at least an internship. But most of the interships and jobs won't hire unless you have two years. So, how do I gain experience in anything if there's no actual entry-level jobs? I need two years to get two years!

Cronyism at its finest.

you didn't check in, what, 4-5 years to see if you were going to an accredited school? wow.

i am impressed that you went to a school that was not good enough to be accredited but somehow you are better than everyone around you, including the folks who are accredited in your chosen career. don't take this the wrong way, but if you are looking for a job as a newbie it might be easier for you if you turn down the scorn a wee bit. it erodes your credibility.

The university is accredited. The college is accredited. The planning program is not.

Very few undergrad degrees in planning are accredited. Usually schools are only accredited for their master's programs. That's why I didn't pursue anything past my bachelors. And very few of the older people I have contact with don't have anything more than an associates degree nor a substantial number of them certified.

The cronyism is that a portion of them don't follow trends, they haven't cracked planning books in two decades, they rarely perform any case studies, they pander to anyone with a bulldozer and a couple hundred thousand to build anything they want and they don't know "computers" very well past office applications.

The various planning groups and organizations rarely reprimanded or call anyone out on bad practices and decisions they made. That's a lack of genuine personal accountability to write bad plans and push bad ideas without any real consequence.

Every year a bad planner stays at their desk, the more and more a population and the economy suffers. So, yes, I will continue to be spiteful. Most of the conditions relevant to physical environment that people face today weren't unintentional or "organic" they were planned.

i see.

understand the sadness about the profession if that is how you see it. the planners i know are from europe and japan and practice in offices devoted to planning in a way not so common in north America perhaps. here in japan planning is not regulated by procedures or legal constraints like in europe, and the result is not dis-similar to usa ...but the planners here tend to work for big companies doing urban revitalisation projects and so on, so the "common" market is not part of their daily routine anyway. my impression was that planners in usa did similar work or else worked for government as technocrats.

myself i have phd in urban planning, but that was earned for research into typologies, behavior, morphological analysis, etc - so my main job is still architect in my own eyes. we team up with urban planner/designer when we try hand at actual planning jobs.

anyway, if you are all that can't you get job with proper planning firm like calthorpe or duany, etc. ? surely they are up to your standards ?


slightly related, but you ever read very good (and seminal) article called "does planning need the plan?", by michael neumann. it is one of my favorite explanations for the state of planning in north america, and may even clarify things for you. it may make you think at least about what it means when you say the current situation was planned.

I am late to the party, but from a quick read, it sounds like you've gotten realistitc answers to your query about the possibilities for planning jobs in architecture firms, rockandhill.

I've been working in the urban design studio of a medium-sized arch+urban design firm for the last several years. I'm an architect and have a planning degree as well. We like to hire folks who have architecture training, since we do design. But those with planning (but not arch) degrees will be hired if they can show design skills and aptitude.

So, that's easy. Two things are not so easy, however.

First, a downturned economy puts the kibosh on most urban development, so that jobs are disappearing by the score. A fluke, but a reality nonetheless.

Second, you're already very put off by an entire professional field of endeavor you haven't even entered yet. This is a problem of attitude --and you, like each of us, is certainly entitled to yours. Some of the problems you describe are true enough; other complaints may be true in some cases, but to generalize so vastly about planning and its problems is really to talk yourself into another career altogether (certainly a viable option, of course).

Part of the professional path is finding a good job where the people aren't all idiots. And those jobs and projects are out there, all over. On the other hand, if you want to work in a field where problems and occasional maddening frustrations don't exist, turn from both architecture and planning right now and run. Run!

It's hard work to find one's way in the attempt to be fulfilled creatively and intellectually in an imperfect discipline. It can be done, and is often done --ask anyone here. But it takes time, and trial, and error.

Actually, Rockandhill, its not two years of intern development if you have a BA from a non-accredited undergrad program, its something ilke 7 years of work of experience (it might be 5.. just doing this by memory), versus 2 years, minimum, for an accredited grad program, before you can sit for the certification exam. Try the AICP website.

I should add that there used to be a lot more BUP/BCP programs, just like there used to be a lot more B.Arch programs (I actually have a dual Bachelors from a school that offers liberal arts and sciences degrees combined with a B.Arch from a school that no longer offers the B.Arch. I later returned to school for dual professional masters in architecture and planning. My feeling is that the M.Arch/MCP/MUP is increasingly regarded as the proefssional entry degree for either profession (in that, if you have a lesser degree, you're increasingly expected to back to school at some point, or you stop advancing professionally). Tragic but true.

here it is:

Education Requirement Professional Experience Required (Yrs)
AICP
Accredited graduate degree in Planning 2 yrs
Non-accredited graduate degree in Planning 3 yrs
Accredited undergraduate degree in Planning 3 yrs
Other post-graduate, graduate or undergraduate college degree 4 yrs

So if you have a non-accredited undergrad degrees, its 4 yrs.

Of course, you can practice without accreditation (especially true in the past), but I've heard this is changing quickly. The Institute is aggressively lobbying states to impose de jure qualification requirements for practice (e.g., New jersey), and I think coming out of the recession, you will basically need accredition for professional advancement.

Level of Education* Total Number of Years of Professional Planning
Graduate degree in Planning from a program accredited by the PAB** 2
Bachelor's degree in Planning from a program accredited by the PAB** 3
Graduate degree in Planning from a program not accredited by the PAB 3
Any other post-graduate, graduate, or undergraduate degree*** 4
No college degree 8


(Does full UBB code even work here?)

It is now but looking towards the past (old princeton review books, et cetera), the education necessary to get a basic job in planning was an Associates. Sometime in the last 10 years, it went from there to Masters.

I wasn't talking about sitting for the exam. I was talking about the paradox of nearly all entry level jobs all requiring two years experience (with a lot of them saying that internships do not qualify as work experience). There's only 14 schools in the country that are PAB accredited.

This is my problem. If I want to get a job (which I actually do want a job in this field), I need two years. From where? Who? When? Who knows. And what's funny about this is that the bigger more important places have lower requirements: City of New York is minimum bachelors with no experience necessary, Portland doesn't claim to need degrees at all, Boston requires a bachelors, Chicago requires a bachelors, L.A. county requires a bachelors, San Fran is the same case and all you have to do is pass a general knowledge test for organizations like CalTrans. The smaller and much simpler places have outlandish requirements. Masters with 5 years experience and three letters of recommendation to work for a 10k person town in Iowa for 28 grand? Bwahahahha.

Internships usually don't pay and are in the most expensive places and most of them require in-the-industry experience. So, how do you get anywhere in this industry when everyone wants experience from the moment you step out of any school? You wait for the babyboomers to die because they sure aren't retiring any time soon.

What kind of jobs are you looking for? I think your best bets are to come in as a graduate/trainee engineer/planner at a private firm (like a transportation planning consultancy) or as a graduate fellow/management/policy analyst generalist polistion at a government organization or as an support person at an NGO/CDC, as part of their annual undergrad intake programs, but bear in mind that these positions will be highly competitive these days and you will be competing with people who have accredited degrees or who are technical generalists in their respective areas (i.e., with a Bachelors in Engineering).

Is it possible for you to consider applying immediately for an accredited graduate planning or architecture program? My inclination is that this may be your best course of action.

I have but no word back on those. I don't have any letters of recommendation (see reasons above) and I'm not sure I could easily obtain any. I doubt someone from an arch. or planning program wants a letter of recommendation from any past professor who might give one... which would probably be three or so professors (black american history professor, near eastern arts professor, history of antiquity professor).

I'm looking for any job in planning-- preferably design-based, dealing in medium- to high-density planning.

urbanist has given very good advice from what i can tell. as difficult as it might seem, the only way to get where you want to go is to start somewhere and work your way up. either with a masters degree or not.

a positive attitude might help get there faster.

if you want to go to grad school use whatever letters of recommendation you can get. they will not decide your entrance anyway. if portfolio or other achievements are not particularly good then it might be hard, but even then there is nothing to stop you from trying harder. good luck.