This is my personal website and blog that hosts my various thoughts on topics such as city planning, walkability, complexity, community, and pop culture. I am a new city planner who works for a local government in the United States. You can contact me at basicdignity123@gmail.com.

I will add a steady flow of articles to this website until hopefully reaching a mature state where you will see very few updates. For now (December of 2024), you will likely see a steady flow of articles.

The three main themes I will focus on are:

1. Understanding that we are living in a physical world with real constraints.
2. Managing complexity as our technologies and organizations start to overwhelm ourselves and the natural world.
3. Improving community connections. The past several decades of intentional and unintentional actions have contributed to what the U.S. Surgeon General in 2023 declared, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” (Book link: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf)

I had a complicated childhood moving back and forth between the United States and South Korea. The experience threw me into the wild world of Korean movies and comic books, which I continue to enjoy. I will sometimes cover pop culture, especially Korean pop culture and some U.S. pop culture, mostly around board games and comic books.

Some more details about my experiences

I worked in IT for about six years testing corporate software, a.k.a. Quality Assurance (QA), after which I decided to explore other careers such as woodworking and cooking. I attended a 5-month woodworking trade school, but I turned out to be too slow and anxious to actually work in the field. And while I briefly worked part-time in the restaurant industry, I could not handle the stress and the low pay.

The experience in IT taught me that we tend to underestimate the burden of complexity. The difficulty I experienced in more physical careers taught me that people who work in abstract careers (like myself) tend to underestimate the complexity and constraints of the physical world.

A long chain of events eventually led me to my current career in city planning at a local government. I realized that the design of our cities have large impacts on our quality of life, community cohesion, and the natural environment. A few memorable events were:

1. I was living in a very car-dependent section of New Jersey. One day, as I was crossing the street since I had the walk light, the driver waiting to turn right yelled, “Walk faster, a**hole.”
2. The software of a company I was working for crashed due to a few lines of bad programming code and caused a nationwide outage. [This is covered in Peak Complexity, Part 1.]
3. A struggling neighbor who was developing dementia insisted on driving and spending hundreds of dollars on specialty TV because these were most of her connections to the outside world in a car-dependent neighborhood with limited amenities.
4. I started noticing more disconnect and paranoia in our society, likely driven by social media and more time spent in front of the screen rather than with each other. A local person I never met in-person developed a conspiracy theory on Facebook where I was supposedly a secret member of a conservative Super PAC because I was participating in a bipartisan conversation group.

Frequently Asked Questions (I came up with them)

How do I find government data?

Except for sensitive materials that directly infringe on personal privacy and safety or have to do with national security, almost all government data is public. The hard part is finding them. Believe it or not, you can first look for something by using Google or another search engine. If you still cannot find the data, you can try to identify the right agency that would be managing the data and search on their website or contact a public official at the agency. Most agencies have officials, often of lower rank, whose job is to deal with questions from the public.

What does city planning involve?

Not a definitive answer, but city planning, often just called planning, involves short- and long- term planning on how to allocate resources and develop land in cities based on trends and known factors. Planning in larger regions is called regional planning, and the two overlap. Updating and administering the local zoning code is one of the common purviews of city planning. I will explain zoning further down.

Is city planning a licensed profession in the United States?

No, city planning is not a licensed profession in the United States as a whole. The American Planning Association (APA), the de-facto national organization for city planners, offers the American Certified Institute of Planners (AICP) certification, but it is not a government license. I got it in May of 2025, but it is usually not a requirement except for high-level positions. New Jersey is one of the states that require AICP for planners. Whether requiring AICP for city planners is the right way or not is a huge question I will not go into here.

What is the difference between the zoning code and the building code?

They work together as sibling regulations, but they regulate different parts of land use. The zoning code focuses on the allowed uses for each district, the exterior dimensions such as setbacks and minimum lot area required to build, and the relationships between different parts within a parcel and between parcels (people, buildings, cars, bicycles, parking spaces, driveways, streets, etc.). The building code focuses on the actual construction methods, materials, and interiors. The zoning code comes first before the building code. For example, if the zoning code for a particular neighborhood doesn’t allow for restaurants, you cannot build it there even if your building is fully compliant with the building code. In Massachusetts, Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40A (“The Zoning Act”) lays out the overall zoning regulations across the state. Each city or town has to define its own detailed zoning code and zoning maps. Whether this is an effective approach long-term is a huge question. Quick trivia: in cities, zoning codes are called “zoning ordinances.” In towns, “zoning bylaws.”