By Jerome Kaufman, FAICP

	The opening session of the conference featured guest speaker Jerome Kaufman, FAICP, planning practitioner, author, and educator. His address, "Looking Ahead: Major Planning Challenges Moving into the 21st Century," explored the unfinished works and new challenges facing planners in this century.

The late Dennis O'Harrow, executive director of the American Society of Planning Officials, once wrote an article on what he called the brief half-life of most planning ideas, the ones that quickly lose their value and are soon forgotten. Thinking back on that piece, I have listed some of the planning challenges that are still likely to be hot 20 or 30 years from now. Three of them have been around for a long time; the others are emerging challenges.

This is the big one. The Census Bureau projects a population of 403 million in the U.S. by 2050 — about 45 percent more than today. What will happen to our settlement patterns as we seek to accommodate this growth? Will smart growth win out? Or will development continue in an even more spread-out, helter-skelter fashion? While optimistic in some ways, I'm skeptical about how much progress will be made in the face of the constraints that stand in the way, particularly when I compare our small steps toward containing sprawl with the far-reaching programs of western European countries.

Despite the hype about comeback cities, many older U.S. cities are still ailing. As the 21st century unfolds, their problems will get worse, with even less help from the federal government. Public-private partnerships will fill some of the gaps, but not nearly enough, in my judgment. One solution is a politically difficult one: to lessen the burden on the cities by building more affordable housing in the suburbs, where most of the jobs are going. But we also need to zero in on what I believe is the critical policy issue for central cities — to make sure that the children of poor families get a far better education than they are getting today.

Finding the elusive key to achieving effective regional action is a continuing challenge. To meet it, we need viable, comprehensive, areawide planning institutions with the capacity to deal effectively with the multiplicity of issues and problems that cut across local jurisdictional lines. Only then can we make a dent in the toughest problems confronting this country's metropolitan areas.

Over the past 10 years, traveling through Europe, the Mideast, and Asia, I've become convinced that the global economy is here to stay. This is an issue of growing importance for planners, no matter what their political opinions about multinational corporations and the like. The challenge is to understand how globalism will impact American communities and regions, not only their economies and job markets, but their environment, transportation, and land-use systems. Planners should be important players in dealing with these impacts.

Planning for community food systems is an issue that has just begun to surface. The food system affects the local economy, the environment, public health, and the quality of neighborhoods. It's also closely interconnected with transportation, housing, and land-use systems. To date, planners have paid little attention to this big hole in the planning field. I'm convinced that they should do more.

As I grow older, I find myself with increasing respect for some of the early planning visionaries — both the form givers and the thinkers, who gave us clear paths to more equitable, livable, and sustainable communities. The idea of planners as visionaries has taken a long snooze as the profession tried to fit itself into a more rational, bureaucratic mode. It's time to wake up and get back in touch with what we stand for. Those who do will be rewarded with a longer half-life.

Jerome Kaufman is a professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin. This viewpoint was written for Planning magazine last year.