urban planning

So, the issue of Urban Planning is the topic of this post. I cannot promise coherency or consistency, but I can state with confidence that I do not understand planning and I am not sure what planners do. The closest I came to an understanding was after reading a book by Kristina Ford called the The Trouble With City Planning. It seems that the trouble with planning is that people do not understand what planners do or what planning is.

We're stuck in a loop with this one.

With all due respect to Ford and other professional planners, it seems that the necessity for planning only becomes apparent after something has gone disastrously wrong. In some cases, we can predict what will go wrong, like in New Orleans, but the collapse of Detroit and other dense urban areas, is more complex. I'm not sure what Randall O'Toole means when he calls himself the "Antiplanner" but the lack of clarity demonstrates how weak the concept is. An architect can say with confidence "I design buildings..." whereas an urban planner cannot ever make the claim that "I design cities..."