Career as an Urban Planner

[grim osprey]

I want to study urban planning at a bachelor level in Europe. My question to <@&787910105185124392> s would be what kind of work do you do as an urban planner having finished a Bc/Ms? More specifically, what kind of bodies do you work for and is the work more bureaucratic with lots of paper work or more "in the field"?

[astral kestrel]

Depends on country

With both working when you finish and studying urban planning.

[grim osprey]

Lets say the majority of European countries, such as the UK, Germany, Norway, Sweden etc

[real rock]

I'm Canadian, but broadly speaking you can work either for government or in private consulting. I would say the job is more office-based than fieldwork.

[real rock]

There are many things you can do with a degree once you're a registered planner. Do you have an area you're interested in specifically?

[grim osprey]

City development/redevelopment is an area I am most interested in

[jolly talon]

I can provide some insight into the English system but I’m at work now so can come back later if that’d be useful?

[grim osprey]

Oh yes, any insight would be much appreciated

[crystal shuttle]

I mean technically i'm not even worthy of this tag anymore since I WAS studying urban planning last year but I dropped out. But yeah I'm Dutch and the most common jobs you see are private consulting for governments (with this it's generally municipal/provincial governments) or you directly work for said governments and are the ones to work with the private consultancies. From what i've gathered from my teachers you can specialise in a lot of things and if you like the theory and paper work that goes into researching how to redevelop stuff you can focus on that, but if you would rather be the one drawing up the plans that's also a thing you can focus on. A lot of the work in the netherlands at least is contacting several people who know how to do the specific tasks you want done so you have the context to work out your own specialisation. But yeah most of it is pretty much office based

At least this is how I see it as someone who's studied for a bachelor level in The netherlands for a year as well as handed down knowledge of my parents who both work at a private traffic consultancy bureau, yet I have no personal experience myself so take this with a grain of salt

[grim osprey]

Another question would be how realistic would it be for a foreigner, say me a Lithuanian, to work abroad with/for governments?

[idle iron]

Im in the midwest US, bs in Urban and Regional Planning/GIS minor. I currently work in zoning which deals a lot with application processing/review, and I attend planning commission, zoning board of appeals, and historic district commission meetings

[astral kestrel]

Inside eu with language knowledge and few exams, probably you could

[real rock]

Nice! Where I am, you would want to look at opportunities in private consulting, probably an interdisciplinary firm that has a limited number of planners and some landscape architect's and a lot of engineers.

[rare ether]

or ngo...

there is a lot of NGO that need planner though or atleast someone with planning degree

[grim osprey]

After some discussion, I was told a not so bad idea would be studying something broader first, like resource management for example, and then specializing in some form of urban planner for a masters. Does seem reasonable or would it be better to study urban planning and then specializing deeper

[grim osprey]

What exactly do you have in mind when you say interdisciplinary firm

[real rock]

I'm in western Canada, and we have purely planning firms that basically only employ planners, but usually when it comes to development-focused firms, the firm's employ engineers, landscape architects, and a lot of engineers with a wide range of specialties that focus on development projects. That way the entire team can cover all the aspects of development, apart from the developer itself! Does that make sense? I'm not sure if I'm explaining really well. This is just based off my experiences

[real rock]

In Canada, stantec would be a really huge example of this as it's such a big company, but there are firms on all scales.
https://www.stantec.com/en