Voices from ACTION 2025: A Conversation with Byungjun Kang, CIP Emerging Planner Award Winner

Each year, CIP’s Emerging Planner Award recognizes a professional within the first 10 years of their planning career who is already making a meaningful impact in the profession. At ACTION 2025, held in Toronto from July 8 to 10, Byungjun Kang received this honour in front of peers, mentors, and leaders from across the country.

In this Q&A, we catch up with Byungjun Kang about his conference experience, the future of planning, and advice for planning students and emerging professionals.

Congratulations on receiving CIP’s Emerging Planner Award! What was it like to be recognized at ACTION 2025?

Thank you! To say that this award is an honour is an understatement. This is a lifetime achievement that will stay with my career, and I am forever grateful to receive the award. I first attended a CIP national conference in 2013 as a student volunteer in Fredericton, and then as a municipal planner in Halifax in 2023. While I am not a stranger to attending planning conferences, it felt especially grand this time to be surrounded by over 1,400 professional planners and aspiring planners – the biggest conference that I have ever attended. Imagine going up on the stage in front of all of them! It was surreal.

What does the Emerging Planner Award mean to you at this stage in your career?

A lot of people may assume that the Emerging Planner Award recognizes the planning projects that I have worked on over the last six years of my experience as a policy planner in the public sector, but I feel like the award recognizes more than that. It recognizes mentorship to emerging planners, public awareness in planning matters, as well as knowledge sharing of planning law, plain language, and international planning to candidate members and planning students. The Emerging Planner Award is not only about excellence in planning work, but also the recipient’s contribution to the profession.

Can you tell us about your experience attending ACTION 2025?

ACTION 2025 was full of exceptional sessions and planners. My colleagues and I were talking about how there are so many good sessions – but they were happening all at the same time! It was positively unfortunate that we had to pick and choose different sessions, but that was how good the sessions were. I enjoyed how a lot of them were forward-looking: the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in planning, as well as the preparation for the next 75 years. They were about lessons learned from the past, and how to apply those lessons in the future. Also, it was equally exciting to reunite with a lot of my colleagues. I have not seen some of them since graduating from the Dalhousie’s planning school, and it was especially heartwarming that some of them purchased a day pass on Wednesday so that they can see me at the award ceremony.

How did the conference help you grow as a professional?

While talking to other planners at the conference, I realized how a lot of the municipalities across Canada are experiencing similar challenges. I was talking to a planner in Edmonton, who also introduced the 8-units-on-a-lot policy in recent years, who shared similar experience, feedback, and policy challenges as Halifax was going through. After chatting in a hallway, we decided to meet again with broader team members after the conference. This experience highlighted the importance of collaboration, instead of being siloed in our work, department, and jurisdiction.

What advice would you give to other early-career planners thinking about attending a future national conference?

Make the best out of a future CIP conference by networking! The national conference is the best way to meet new planners across Canada in person. It might be intimidating at first to approach someone to whom you have never spoken, but the atmosphere is set up so that you would feel comfortable doing so at meals and receptions. Some of the best friends I have made in planning were by sitting at a random table during breakfast at 8 a.m. If you start a conversation with “What do you do for work?”, be prepared to listen to that person’s whole career journey and be amazed!

What’s next for you? Are there any projects or goals on the horizon?

Actually, I have accepted a new senior planner position with the City of Richmond Hill, Ontario! I am moving from Halifax to Toronto to start a new chapter of my life (considering how I have lived in the Maritimes for the last 21 years). Coincidentally, this conference provided me with an opportunity to meet with my future manager in person, and it was lovely! I am nervously excited to move and work in an area that I have never been to, but I have always sought after opportunities in larger cities. I have no doubt that the new experience will turn me into a better professional planner.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with CIP members?

Something I took away from both my work experience and this conference is the cost of inaction. Especially after the pandemic, I feel like planners can no longer take as much time as we would like to, given how fast the world around us is changing. Of course, we want our plans to be as perfect as possible – but can an outdated plan be perfect? While we are bound to make some mistakes along the way, we can also fix them quickly. Because every extra day we take to write a plan is another day for the residents to suffer from delays. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. Take ACTION.