Be a Contributor

Urban Planning Post is a space for planners, students, and community members to share knowledge, spark ideas, and tell their stories. Whether you're working on a project, exploring trends, or reflecting on the planning practices, we invite you to contribute.

Your article will be reviewed by our editorial team to ensure it’s relevant, clear, and adds value to our community of readers. If you are interested in being a contributor, feel free to reach out to urbanplanningpost@gmail.com.

What Can You Contribute?

We accept submissions for our main three sections:

Best Practices: Short-form description of a new type of project, approach, method, or policy that solves for an urban planning issue. The objective is to provide a space for inspiration- introduce planners to different types of practices that have impactful results. Your submission should inform, improve, or enhance existing planning knowledge/practice. The Best Practices Hub is supposed to answer the what, where, how, and the end results of your selected project, approach, method, or policy. Submissions will have to select a field and a location:
- Field
  - Community Development
  - Environmental Planning
  - Hazard Mitigation
  - Housing Planning
  - Transportation Planning
  - Urban Design
  - Land Use & Law
  - Any other field as you see fit for your entry
- Location
  - Anywhere in the world

Blog: It is a longer format, it is meant to not only answer the basic questions, but to paint a whole picture. The knowledge is meant to be transferable and geographically relevant. It is required to have references/sources. Projects can be tagged as:

Project Exhibition - Show us what you’re working on! This category highlights innovative plans, designs, or community engagement projects. Whether it's built, ongoing, or conceptual, we want to see it.
Perspectives - Share your insights and opinions on planning practices, policy, or theory. This space is for thoughtful takes—big or small—on what’s shaping the field.
Discovery - Share what you’ve uncovered! This category features things you notice in cities—both new places and fresh takes on the familiar—as well as helpful tools, resources, or ideas. Whether it’s a clever design, a great dataset, or a surprising detail in your daily surroundings, let us in on what sparked your curiosity.
Story - Tell your planning story. From fieldwork adventures to career milestones to challenges that changed you—this is where we connect through real-life experiences.

Urban Lexis: It is meant to support the evolutionary description of urban planning jargon-concepts in different geographies/ contexts (political, cultural, linguistic).* Submissions will have to select a field and a location.
- Field
  - Community Development
  - Environmental Planning
  - Hazard Mitigation
  - Housing Planning
  - Transportation Planning
  - Urban Design
  - Land Use & Law
  - Any other field as you see fit for your entry
- Region of Focus
  - Anywhere in the world

* We also welcome revisions or alternatives to existing definitions! This space is meant to be a living document that reflects as many regions as possible.

Ready to contribute?

Submitting your entry

Please submit your entry via email to urban-planning-post@googlegroups.com

Format: Word or Google Doc

Subject line: UPP entry

You can expect to receive a response with next steps and more information within 3-4 business days. If you don’t please feel free to follow up by contacting urbanplanningpost@gmail.com or asalmeron633@gmail.com.

Writing Style

Our style is non-academic, casual, and written in plain language—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be creative. Feel free to be poetic, personal, or inspirational. We want your voice to shine through—like you’re talking to a friend, reflecting on a walk, or sharing a spark of insight over coffee with a fellow planner.

There are no word-count limits for any of the entries regardless of the category. HOWEVER, please keep it brief and engaging.

You can use current posts as inspiration, but you may also request a sample if it is your first time publishing your writing.

Guidelines for references and citations

UPP uses the American Planning Association Guidelines:

Depending on the number of in-text citations used, authors may create separate References and Resources sections, or may combine the two. UPP’s electronic format makes a list of links to online resources for planners especially useful. Authors may provide a list of additional resources beyond those referenced in the article, providing further information on the subject to the reader.
UPP reference style is based on parenthetical author-date Chicago Manual of Style reference style; please convert footnotes, if used, to in-text citations. Alphabetize the list of references by author's last name. Include a URL if the resource is available online. For example:

Bochner, Brian, Kevin Hooper, Benjamin Sperry, and Robert Dunphy. 2011. NCHRP Report 684: Enhancing Internal Trip Capture Estimation for Mixed-Use Developments. Washington, D.C.: National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Transportation Research Board. Available at http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_684.pdf

Guidelines for AI-assisted Content

While there is nuance as far as what it means for a post to be assisted by AI, we care most that the author of the post is able to stand by the information they are sharing. We encourage the use of AI experimentation with the appropriate disclosure, while wholly discouraging the use of these tools to prolifically generate content which has not been scrutinized prior to publication.

Please review the American Planning Association’s Planning Ethics and Generative AI if you are considering using AI to create any content for UPP.

AI-assisted and -generated articles are allowed on UPP, so long as they follow these guidelines:

AI-assisted and -generated articles should…
- Be created and published in good faith, meaning with honest, sincere, and harmless intentions.
- Disclose the fact that they were assisted by AI in the “This article was created with the help of AI” would be appropriate.
- Ideally add something to the conversation regarding AI and its capabilities. Tell us your story of using the tool to create content, and why!
- Be checked for factual accuracy before publishing. Thanks!)
AI-assisted and -generated articles should not…
- Promote any business, program, or course (including your own).
- Be published with the intent to confuse, deceive, or bamboozle its readers.
- Be published with the main purpose of building a personal brand, building a social media presence, or gaining clout.
- Contain educational content or information generated by AI because you, the human author, did not already know it to some degree. AI is great for assistance with English syntax for a variety of reasons, but if you don’t already know or understand the concept you’re writing about, please do not rely on the machine to “know” it for you.

Please note that your article could be run through https://www.zerogpt.com/ and if the content is mostly AI-generated your submission will not be considered.