Unsure about a planning or architecture career? Here’s 3 takes on how to make it work for you.

Urban Minds Project Coordinator, Jane Law, interviews three genre-bending individuals working in the urban planning and architecture fields.

Daniel Rotsztain is a geographer, landscape designer, writer, and visual artist with 4 years of experience in the planning and architecture industry. His projects explore and support the city’s public life, ecological identity, and the responsibilities of settlers as treaty people on Turtle Island.

Katie Lee is an intern architect, urban planner, musician, and artist with 5 years of private sector experience in the planning and architecture industry. She is interested in community building and cultural spaces.

Erin Tito is an urban planner with 7 years of experience in the public and private sector planning industry. She is interested in adaptive reuse of industrial buildings, landscape urbanism, and climate change resilience.

Q: How would you describe planning and architecture to a highschool student?

Daniel

Planning is the ways that we collectively decide what / how a city looks and functions. Landscape architecture is understanding how the ways we design a landscape can benefit humans, plants, animals, the ways we get around, water systems, etc.

Katie

Architecture is a broader field than you may think it to be — it’s not just buildings; there are so many avenues you can take within architecture once you start. Some people go into set design, planning, policy, law — there’s so many aspects to it, and it’s really up to you what/where you’d like to focus on within architecture.

Erin

Urban planning is a huge field and there’s many different ways you can be a planner — working for a private firm, a private company like a big box store, working for a government. You can affect everything from like transportation to land use to heritage to … it’s endless — there’s probably something for everyone.

Q: What inspired you to study urban planning / landscape architecture?

Daniel

I have an irrational love for Toronto. I grew up exploring and learning about city by cycling with my dad. But I didn’t know that urban planning or architecture were fields of study until I took a calculus class in the architecture building as part of my business degree. I tried to switch into architecture, but didn’t have the necessary highschool credits, so I picked geography.

In my first geography class, we read about people’s love for the city and how people aspire to take care of it —?PlazaPOPs?(an initiative founded by Daniel) is an idealistic endeavour of applying what I learned in practice.

I grew up around Bathurst and Lawrence, and have fond memories of the Jewish strip malls in that area. But in school, there seemed to be a tirade against the suburbs; there was this one idea of what a city could look like. And I though back to my childhood and how this didn’t fit — there’s so much vibrancy and culture that goes unrecognized, and Toronto could be the best version of itself if it embraced these qualities rather than pretending to be somebody else.

There’s also the social justice side of things too — the parts of the city with the least services and most transit reliance are the same parts with no shade and seating — what are ways we can introduce a more human scale and dignity in an existing place, and work with what’s already working?

Q: Why was landscape architecture the next degree for you?

I wanted the design language, but I brought a planner’s lens. All my projects in my landscape architecture degree were centred around planning, and using design language to think about how to address current issues in the city scape.

Katie

I actually wanted to be a photographer, but my parents wouldn’t let me, so I went through other career path options. I always wanted to do something creative. I ended up choosing architecture because it has this mythology of being a professional field that is also creative.

Now, I feel that other forms of creative careers like being an artist or photographer are just as valid as being an architect. Just because you need a degree to practice in architecture, that’s not necessarily worth more than being an artist in the creative field.

After I started school, I continued doing it because through my undergraduate degree, I realized how philosophical architecture could be, and that’s what drew me in—how it organized people and how people respond to spaces.

Q: After working in the architecture profession, how did your perspective around being an architect change?

The profession not as philosophical and creative as you want or think it to be; you have to consider to consider time, money and clients. I’m sure other creative fields have restrictions, but there’s so many in architecture.

Also — architecture is such a vast and changing industry, we’re in a moment where we’re trying to figure out what architecture really is.

The definition of an architect has changed through history and time, and I wish people would embrace that more — I think architects are facilitators and we work with the public. The public is always changing, their needs are changing, and we should respond to that. We shouldn’t confine ourselves to buildings and physical spaces, but rather how people use places; place is also about its function and how people organize within it.

Erin

I went into urban planning because I like how a city makes you feel, and I wanted to understand why that is. I did my undergraduate degree in political science because I liked how it was so broad — you can study it from so many different angles, and I thought planning was the same in that sense.

Q: What intrigues you most about the urban planning / architecture field, or the types of problems you get to address?

Daniel

The things that are closest to us, in terms of issues (transit, getting around the city, access to green space, homelessness) are all problems of urban planning, so it feels like the closest thing to imagining a better future. Urban planning has a lot of tools to address these issues — so I see a lot of potential in solving these problems in this field.

And with landscape architecture, there’s something very immediate about it. You’re wandering through the city and you say “there’s no shade, there’s no benches, there’s no place for people to be”, and you can visualize the solution and make it happen together with urban planning.

Katie

People in the architecture field are always trying to push the definition of what architecture is — the ways we think about places, and not just buildings. We’re always branching out, collaborating with communities, advocates, etc — being a creative facilitator.

Erin

I think that our work as urban planners directly impacts people, and you can really see the power of what we do — it has a big impact on people’s lives. And there’s so much room for improvement — some of the biggest problems our society faces can be at least helped through urban planning.

Q: Are there any planning or architecture stereotypes that you think aren’t true?

Daniel

There’s this idea that architects are the fancy design people and planners are boring regulations people, but I think you can be imaginative in planning and you can be regulations based in architecture—it’s what you bring to the field that matters most.

For me, I’m trying to be a visual planner. There’s a stereotype that planners follow regulations, but I think that planners can imagine new regulations. You can achieve a lot of what you’re looking to do in design-oriented fields in planning and vice versa.

Katie

#1: I don’t think you need to do all nighters or work long hours to deliver a good project — if you know how to speak well and convince people, you’ll have a good project.

#2: People think architecture is a professional degree, but there’s no security in architecture. From what I’ve learned, your job is not secure, and a lot of people move around a lot. In some ways, it’s precarious like being an artist, but with a degree.

#3: A stereotype I agree with — architects are never good at one thing, they just try to do everything.

Q: What’s one tip you’d give to the high-school you? (or students considering planning or architecture degrees)?

Daniel

You can make a career out of what you love. You should follow what is passionate to you.

Katie

Try as many different things as you possibly can — don’t feel pressured into just doing one thing because “that’s what you’re supposed to do” you have all the time in the world.

Erin

Don’t be so worried about specific information or training. Focus on how well you communicate, and basic skills because that’s what matters when you have any job — the ability to work well with people — anything else you can be taught.

If you have a good relationship with a teacher, nurture it and don’t be afraid to lean on it. Continue doing that in university/college as well, because you’ll get more out of the class, and it’s good practice for “networking”; it’s just about having good conversations with people you find cool.

Key Takeaways

We hope these interviews gave you some insight what it’s like studying and practicing in the urban planning and architecture industry. There’s so many paths you can take, even after you’ve picked your degree.

Our goal at Urban Minds is to make these professions as accessible to youth as possible. With that in mind, here are three key takeaways from our interviews with Daniel, Katie, and Erin:

1. Often, the most imaginative and creative ideas come from being able to approach a problem with your own unique toolkit and knowledge base, which can be developed both inside?and?outside of school, and involve cross-disciplinary collaboration.
2. Both the planning and architecture fields get to tackle a wide variety of present-day issues. Knowing your “why” (or what drives you) can help you figure out which types of problems you’re interested in solving.
3. Lastly, developing your communication skills is key. In both professions, you’ll need to gain buy-in from the general public, who may not always understand the jargon and specifics of your profession.

Jane Law is a Project Coordinator at?Urban Minds.

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