The City Planners by Margaret Atwood

The poem suggests that the rigid order of suburban life reflects fear rather than civilization — fear of nature, chaos, and death. City planners who create these environments think they can impose control through straight lines, yet Atwood reveals that this control is merely an illusion. The earth will endure long after their plans fade.

She finds them deeply unsettling because they try so hard to seem reassuring. The neatness feels aggressive to her — it's an attack on nature, spontaneity, and anything that can't be measured or planned. It's not just that she thinks suburbs are boring; she believes the drive to make them perfect shows an anxious and even violent side in the people who create and live in them.

They are essentially the urban designers and developers responsible for planning streets and zones. However, Atwood uses them as a symbol for the human tendency to impose complete rational order on the world. By labeling their visions as 'insane,' she challenges the common belief that those who appear to be in control are, in fact, the most disconnected from reality.

The poem employs free verse—lacking regular rhyme or meter—which aligns with its theme, as the speaker pushes back against the notion of enforced structure. Atwood uses sharp, somewhat clinical language, irony, and gradually builds a sense of discomfort. She also incorporates cataloguing (listing suburban details) to evoke a feeling of accumulation, suggesting that the evidence against the suburb continues to mount.

It has an environmental dimension — Atwood views the suburb as a violent act against nature. However, it’s more than just a simple green message. The poem also explores psychology, particularly the mindset of individuals who require a perfectly tidy world, and critiques the political systems (like planning, zoning, and property) that impose that expectation on everyone.

The poem finishes with the city planners in their offices, continuing to draw their straight lines, completely unaware that the earth beneath their tidy streets is already shifting to reclaim everything. This matters because Atwood doesn’t provide any comfort or resolution — the planners are still busy, the suburb is still there, but the reader senses that this is all only temporary. Nature will ultimately have the last word, even if it hasn't said anything yet.

'The City Planners' was included in Atwood's debut major poetry collection, The Circle Game, released in 1966. This collection won the Governor General's Award, which is Canada's highest literary honor, and it helped to establish Atwood as a poet with significant aspirations before she gained fame as a novelist.

The concerns here—control versus wildness, the fragility of civilized surfaces, and how systems meant to create order can turn into systems of oppression—are themes woven throughout almost all of Atwood's work. The Handmaid's Tale, for example, amplifies this idea: a society that attempts to fully plan and control human life ultimately exposes its own insanity.