The way I see it, city planners have two jobs. The first is to understand how their city works and to chart a path for their city’s future. That’s the easy part. The other job is to make sure all their city’s residents and elected officials do, too. That’s a little more tricky.

You see, city planning is ultimately a democratic process. Every decision is voted on by your city council, whose members want to keep their residents happy. If city residents, aka voters, don’t understand how a city works, they can’t be expected to support the difficult decisions their elected officials need to make.

So, that’s why I’m here — to write about cities, how they work, and how they don’t. Maybe if more of us understand how our cities work, we’ll get the cities we deserve.