A real planner this time

The city of Springfield has hired its own city planner, a real one this time. Her name is Suraksha Bhandari. She studied at the University of Utah after life in Nepal but she might find Springfield’s city hall no less strange a place than Mormon Salt Lake. She brings to the job degrees in architecture and metropolitan planning but she also knows about disaster risk management. We can pretty much guess which one she’ll need most.

That city hall needs better advice about regulating development has been plain for years. In 2015 the State Journal-Register complained that many of Springfield’s problems with drainage, traffic, sprawl, parking and the like “could have been averted had the city paid better attention to planning.” Having its own planner will make that easier to do, but we can only hope that Bhandari was not hired simply to spare everyone else at city hall having to pay attention to planning. That’s because it is not planners who decide how a city will be built. Developers and elected officials decide, and it would be nice if they stopped building Springfield without bothering to read the instructions first. 

All a planner can do officially is research, explain and recommend. However, there remain lots of ways short of a veto power that she can make herself useful. For example, every project review raises the same issues. Does a proposed new strip mall or subdivision conform to the zoning map? Is it a good project? Will the project be good for Springfield? These are distinct questions, and a good planner can clarify them for decision-makers. She also can look at site plans (as apparently no one else did) to avoid cockups like the one that dumped traffic from a large strip mall onto small strip of street where Hedley meets White Oaks West near Wabash. 

The city’s planner also can remind alderpersons and mayors that things that are done wrong today will stay wrong for a long time. Springfield still has unconnected streets left by haphazard platting in the 1800s. In the 1960s Sandburg school was built on the wrong side of a multilane highway from where its students lived and it will stay on the wrong side until it falls down. As Myron West, the author of Springfield’s very first city plan, pointed out a century ago, urban planning, inexpensive, may prevent mistakes which cost millions.

The city’s new planner might also explain that good development does not always mean building things. The city has lost to new construction too much of the stream-cut terrain better preserved for vistas or parks. And while she’s at it, Bhandari might whisper in the ears of decision-makers that God’s 11th commandment was not that any street with enough car traffic to support commercial uses must be surrendered to commercial uses.

Much of her work will be technical, but any good urban planner must also be a teacher. Much of the local private sector, for instance, tends to see planning as an intrusion into the private sphere, but development is just as plausibly understood as an intrusion into the public sphere. Planners are our advocates for the public sphere, looking at the city as a whole and not lot by lot or plat by plat, taking into consideration how new shops or houses sit on the street, how they relate to their neighbor buildings, how their operations affect the environment and what they add to the visual environment that is, after all, Springfieldians’ only universally shared experience of the city.

Alas, changing minds on those points inside or outside of city hall would require not just a conversation but something more like a religious conversion. Elected officials in particular tend to confuse good urban planning, which most of them regard as a nuisance, with economic development, which they regard as their main job. Bhandari will be working out of the mayor’s Office of Planning and Economic Development, which might be more accurately titled the Office of Planning for Economic Development. But Springfield’s first planner argued that to make Springfield a better place for business you first make it a better place for people by ameliorating the effect that unplanned business development has on a city. Wrote West in 1924, “It is not enough to advertise a city. This advertising must be accompanied by proof that the city in question is built and operated as to offer real quality to newcomers.” 

There is much more that might be said about all of this and I hope to say some of it in future columns – about how politics affects planning decisions, about how lack of funds presses the city council to make decisions that are good for the City of Springfield but bad for the city of Springfield, about how city hall might learn from its mistakes. In the meantime, every patriotic Springfieldian ought to wish Ms. Bhandari well.   

Mr. Krohe first wrote about urban planning in the capital city for Illinois Times in 1976. 

This article appears in February 19-25, 2026.