I Wanna Be a Town Planner · A Day In The Life Of A Town Planner

Emma visits the Department of Planning WA to find out what being a Town Planner entails.
Check out more details about a career in Town Planning here: https://studentedge.org/career-life/f...

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What does it take to become a Town Planner?

Planners are involved in making long and short-term decisions about the management and development of cities, town, villages and the countryside. They aim to balance the conflicting demands of housing, industrial development, agriculture, recreation, transport and the environment, in order to allow appropriate development to take place.

Planners are at the heart of regeneration within towns and cities, taking into account the often competing views of business and local communities. In rural areas, they must ensure that development is sustainable and that the right balance of development is achieved to preserve the countryside. The work of planners also makes a positive contribution to tackling the effects of climate change.

Transcript
Hi, I'm Emma and today thanks to Student Edge i'm here at the Department of Planning in Western Australia. What am I doing here? Well today I'm here to find out exactly what it's like to be a town planner and whether or not this might be your dream job, so come on let's go find out.

Now you might be thinking what on earth is a town planner and what exactly do they plan? To be honest I really don't know but that's okay because today I'm catching up with real-life town planner Nicholas to find out exactly what's involved.

So what would you like to know?

I'm here today because i'd love to know exactly what it is that a town planner does.

Okay, town planners work to plan human settlements and that could be anywhere from a large Australian city to a small country town or even remote and regional areas. We work with engineers, architects, designers, landscape architects, to come up with long-term plans for cities and regional areas. One of the projects that have recently worked on that I was quite proud of was the Elizabeth Quay project which is down the Perth waterfront with the aim of bringing the city back to the river, so that's been really exciting. It's only down the road from our office so i get to see the way it's developing everyday. Another project that we're working on is trying to reduce congestion and alleviate some of the transport concerns in our city at the moment and one of the ways that we're doing that is by planning for public transport on some of our wider arterial roads that run into the city itself.

Well your job sounds very important and interesting, can you take us through a typical day?

The typical day might started at 8.30 i'll come into the office and check my emails and work out what I have to do for the day. It would normally involve a couple of meetings in the morning and they could be with anybody from the community to local government agencies, other state government agencies or other professionals and then in the afternoon I'll tend to work with my team and we'll get out our maps and plans and start to draw, try and work out solutions to problems in different areas of the city.

I think it's time for you to give us the edge. I've got 3 questions. The first question, what makes a great town planner?

Well I think to be a good town planner you need to have a vision and an idea for how you'd like the city to look and feel that's most important i think. Secondly you need to be a really good listener you need to try and understand how people feel about their own community in their own area. Sometimes they may have ideas that are more valid or better than than yours and thirdly I think you need to have patience you need to understand that some of the plans that you're working on may take 5-10 sometimes 20 years to eventuate. What steps would somebody need to take to become a town planner?

Well it's important that people have a keen interest in geography when they start out. You go to university generally and do a town planning degree or sustainability degree or something to do with urban design and most major universities offer those courses.

Now finally Nick if you could still end up exactly where you are today that have done one thing differently what would that have been?

I think the work experience really help with that and being part of the department's graduate program but one thing that's really important is just trust yourself and understand that you've got very valid ideas to bring to the table and it's really important to follow the career path that you think will be right for you.

If you love geography and are interested in designing our future then perhaps you should consider a career as a town planner but remember what Nick said you've got to find out who you are and believe in yourself. For more information and to get involved log onto https://studentedge.org