Paul Zucker, Obituary

Submitted by Bill Ross

Paul Zucker

We have lost a giant in the planning profession. A person that touched and taught planners across the country, and in Georgia. The following is an excerpt from Paul’s obituary.

Well known planner and management consultant Paul Zucker passed away on July 20, 2018.

Paul Zucker was a peripatetic architect, planner, management consultant, and author whose career spanned coast to coast directing four major planning departments, creating a non-profit economic development company, consulting with clients throughout the United States and Canada and teaching thousands of planners in his short courses. He created his own planning and management consulting firm, Zucker Systems, in 1982. He spent the next 36 years advising over 170 planning and building departments in 33 states on how to better manage their planning and development functions. He wrote extensively on this topic publishing eight books: The Management Idea Book, The ABZ’s of Planning Management, What Your Planning Professors Forgot To Tell You, Mis-Management, Cats Dogs and Friends at the Office, Planning is Funny, and What Kind of a Planning Director Will You Be This Year.

He traveled the country teaching planning management to over 10,000 planners. In 2000, AICP recognized his work and made him a member of the College of Fellows (FAICP). In 2007, he received an Honor Award from the California Planner Emeritus Network.

Paul was an alum of the Universities of Nebraska and California at Berkeley where he was a Sears Fellow. In his early career he worked for the Bucks County, Pennsylvania planning department and then ran a Boston consulting firm for the renowned Dean of MIT’s Planning School, Jack Howard. Later he served as the Planning Director of San Diego County and Marin County, California, and Tucson, Arizona. For five years he also ran a non-profit corporation bettering the lives of low income Hispanics in California’s Central Valley where his program worked closely with Cesar Chavez.