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Planners must engage in the political system. Politics, as murky and wayward it may be, influences significant consequences in the way our cities are formed and developed. To not participate in the system is to resolve to practice small-scale in the private sector, "off the grid" if you will. Planners strike me as individuals that strive to enact widespread, large scale change; to do so one must engage with the public and the civic, and hence the government and its politics.

This is actually one reason why I am not attracted to Planning as a career. I like to operate piece-by-piece, with small interventions. To me planning invites the opportunity for huge gains at the expense of huge, guaranteed costs. These costs are inevitable because the issues envelop massive swaths of the physical domain, and interact with individuals and groups providing limitless diversity in opinion. With an overwhelming scale, it's not possible to regard every issue, every person, to solve every problem. Thus the work of a Planner is positioned towards accepting failure time and time again.

Politics is an inherent part of the game, so why not embrace it. No matter what scale one is working at, Planner or Architect or X, if there are people involved politics can't be avoided. A planner must, however, get used to the limelight of politics at its epicenter-government- to truly delve into the capacity of the profession to improve the lives of many.

a relevant video