Is it more practical to combine urban planning with social work or counseling?

Social work and counseling are related to urban planning because counseling, social work and urban planning all ultimately deal with human behavior. In addition, human behavior takes place within many contexts including geographic and economic. Counseling and social work have rich historical connections to social reform movements and community intervention. However, most professionals in counseling and social work today see themselves as clinicians. Today, most counselors and social workers are seen as being experts in micro (individual or group) practice or therapy but not macro (community intervention and/or community organization) practice. While the mainstream has moved away from macro practice, counseling and social work each have small numbers of active, effective, community activists. Often they are not paid well which tends to keep them a small minority. (Many social agencies and practitioners can get third party reimbursement from insurance companies but there is no equivalent funding mechanism to serve communities needing intervention). One profession which is increasingly bridging the gap between micro and macro is criminal justice. This moves the police away from individual, band-aid solutions to a more comprehensive approach to community safety. Community policing is growing very quickly in many industrialized countries. In community policing, the police officer takes on many of the traditional roles of the community social worker; intervening in many nuisance types of issues before they grow and lead to larger, acute community problems. Some police departments now actively recruit at colleges and universities for graduates who studied in the helping professions. More and more hospitals and major corporations in big cities are hiring those trained in the helping professions to improve the community around their facilities. However, even though some counselors and social workers have found good work in these settings, such jobs tend to be geared toward working with block clubs, schools, criminal justice agencies, urban planning agencies, etc.,. Our tendency to specialize in narrower professions is making it more and more difficult to find employment which combines counseling or social work, as most of us define them today, with urban planning. Your question was a great one. Dare to test conventional limits and don't limit yourself due to conventional wisdom. As Frederick Law Olmsted used to say, "Make no small plans."

Dennis