On Being a Planner

I've worked at a lot of scales; when you build, you work at 1:1 scale. During schematic design, we often work at 1/16th scale, which is really 1:192. Shop drawings are done at 1:4 or even 1:2.
Urban planning is done at 1:90,000. Now that's a scale.
But the truth of the matter is, once one knows how design is a matter of collecting, organizing, and then synthesizing knowledge, the planning process is not so distant from the shop drawing process. The sensory input is different: we're no longer interested in the tactile, or the resolution of structural stresses, or the watertightness of a flashing system. Rather, we are interested in populations, their interactions, their selfish decisions compounded by sheer numbers of them. We start to concern ourselves with sense of place, with those places being of the neighborhood, or community, or even the region.
And as much as it may seem rude to say it, the planning profession has been wrong just as many times as the architectural design professions.