The remaining 1960 weeks of my professional life as a planner

What will planning look like in 2050? How will I have impacted the built environment, and perhaps more vainly, what will I look like in 2050? Vanity and awareness are both essential for futureproofing, but they also raise a deeper question: What are planners doing in 2025, and what will they be doing in 2050?

From this line of questioning, I worked out that so far, my professional life has encompassed 140 weeks, and I have roughly 1,960 weeks of work remaining. It made me realise that while planning is often seen as a slow-moving glacier, our impacts are more like valleys. An important question I want to answer in the remaining 1960 weeks of work is what will be left in our wake?

In this blog, I’ll assess the current urban landscape and how we’re moving forward, while also addressing issues that may be ‘news’ to some, but echoes of long-standing concerns to others.

Rethinking engagement

When you think of stakeholder engagement, do you picture community halls, shuffling feet, and proposal plans pinned to walls? A certain age and class demographic, able to attend a 12–4pm event on a Tuesday? This paper-and-people approach has long been the standard, but we can, and are, moving forward from that.

Planning must confront the reality where many engagement events only capture input from a narrow slice of the community. Input without diversity and vibrancy becomes stale and stagnant.

Fortunately, the profession is evolving. We’re seeing more community engagement through virtual city models, or digital twins, that simulate and adapt urban environments. This integration of digital play and real-world consultation creates relevant, fun, and meaningful engagement. It opens the door to people who would never have otherwise engaged. Recent examples include Re:Imagine London, which used the gaming world of Fortnite to explore urban massing concepts. In Lewisham, a similar Fortnite-based event turned engagement into an esports-style experience, backed by the council and made interactive through influencers. Ideas like this engage young people who are as much a part of the communities as any other group.

If this is how we continue to view and measure engagement, planners can reach further and do more.

The missing voices

This led me to the question of how we activate marginalised voices in planning. What are the data gaps? What are the known unknowns versus the unknown unknowns?

I know there are questions I don’t have the ability to intrinsically understand. But if a large proportion of planning bodies lack diversity and remain complacent, then countless unknown unknowns may never be addressed.

Take something as simple as a pathway. I can navigate bins, Lime Bikes, scooters, and street clutter. But it is likely to be different to someone with limited mobility, a wheelchair user or a parent with a pram. We also need to understand how space is used and perceived and ask ourselves: who are we designing places for?

As Caroline Criado Perez powerfully notes in Invisible Women, “When planners don’t account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.” This is evident in most urban areas. We must address this by fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion in every conversation.

From this we must address and account that planning is for everyone – which requires transparency and a willingness to adapt. Holding onto complex ‘traditional’ planning may be beneficial to keep consultants employed but it also creates a bloated and opaque profession, one which unintentionally creates barrier to entry. However, we are seeing a change. Increasingly, the planning profession is becoming a diverse and open practise, allowing for new methodologies and viewpoints to create intrinsically impactful planning which benefits an entire community – not just a slice of it.

Looking ahead

By 2050, we’ll face a host of new planning constraints — but also many of the same old ones. Will we have learned how to better address them?

In my 1,960 weeks, what will I have achieved? How will planning have changed me? More grey hairs – without doubt – but hopefully some will have been in the ambition of betterment.

However, the elephant in the room must be addressed: I have expressed that while I optimistically have 1,960 weeks left; I may not get those weeks.

The world is not addressing climate change or political instability with the seriousness they demand. I may not get to see 2050 — and that, too, must be planned for.