What’s next for Jennifer Keesmaat?

Jennifer Keesmaat, the most visible and outspoken bureaucrat Toronto has had in many years, is leaving her post as the city’s chief planner at the end of next month after five years in the job.

The news is unexpected, and prompts immediate speculation about what she’s doing next: Running for mayor? It’s possible to imagine it. Or for provincial office or council? Also possible, if less glamorous. Taking a job in Australia or Europe or the U.S.? Eh, maybe. Setting up in private practice as a globe-trotting big-dollar consultant? At this point that last one, the least interesting option, would seem to be the most likely.

Her announcement specifies only that she’ll “pursue other interests” — the “no comment” of job departure language. On Twitter, she said she’ll “take a breather and spend some time with family,” and will “continue to champion the city that I love, Toronto.”

And that she felt it was time “to begin my next chapter.”

So, today, who knows? It’s fun to think of her launching a mayoral run premised on her expansionary, optimistic, urbanist vision for the city (it’s been a while since we had a candidate who actually articulated a vision for Toronto). We’ll find out soon enough if she has her eye on the political arena.

Although what is noteworthy of her time as head of the city’s planning department is that it’s been clear all along she was already in the political arena. More than any other bureaucrat in memory, she seemed to realize that she occupied an inherently political job, one in which she could communicate with the general public and politicians to build a constituency for her ideas — and sell them.

It’s an approach reminiscent of old-timey city-building bureaucratic power brokers such as Robert Mo- ses in New York City or R.C. Harris in Toronto, though she undertook it in a job with less formal authority than either of those two men ever held. (Harris, for example, could and did get tax funding for his projects over the objection of city council through direct referenda.) Today our elected officials decide, usually openly in public, on what to do and how and how much to spend. As they should.

Department heads in the city government report to city council, offer advice and take orders. It has seemed, in too many cases, like they take orders on what advice to give, too — or at least on what advice becomes public. At the very least, most municipal employees have seemed to think it was their job to stay in the background, provide just-the-facts-ma’am answers at council meetings, keep their conclusions and opinions to themselves and remain anonymous to the general public.

As much of the city is well aware, that’s not how Keesmaat went about the job. And the city is better for her more public approach. She made the topics of urban planning that often seem boring a matter of broad conversation by her media-friendly approach, her use of social media and podcasts, and public events. Parkland, transportation, street design, condo living (and building), even zoning.

These are core issues for the city, about how we live together and grow together, and the city we will become.

Her job was described to the Globe by Mayor John Tory — who reportedly asked her to stay when she resigned — as a “meat grinder” because of the demands the pace of change and construction in Toronto place on the planning department. And there is no doubt that her whole department was ground all the harder and faster for being consistently and dramatically understaffed for years. Keesmaat once told me offhand that one of her biggest frustrations was that her best people were always leaving after a few years because not only was the pay so much lower than in the private sector, but the workload was so ridiculously higher. Too much work for a good planner to do their best work.

A lot of what Keesmaat talked most excitedly about in the job was not the stuff of typical headlines, but about reforming the process. Her department was trying to change to make the city less reactive to proposals from private developers by setting up more rules and guidelines (for midrises and highrises, for area plans, for parks and public spaces, for the whole city core). And to help reform the whole Ontario Municipal Board appeal process.

Much of her visible legacy is yet to be determined: Will rail deck park be built? Will the King St. transit priority pilot project be a success? Will the transit “network plan” she oversaw that attempted to politically legitimize the Scarborough subway (as her political masters demanded) while also reviving shelved LRT network plans and breathing life into the relief subway line be built?

We don’t know yet, and Keesmaat will not be around as chief planner to push them along. Of course, as my colleague Christopher Hume pointed out this week, she didn’t get to make the final decisions on those beloved projects anyhow, as was made dramatically clear when council decided to rebuild the eastern Gardiner Expressway over her objections.

For now, she can leave happy with five sometimes contentious years where she made urban planning in Toronto, and the future of the city, seem as exciting and important as it ever has been.

Leaving the rest of us to wonder if she plans to come back and see her other projects through in a position where her political authority might match up with her knack for generating policy excitement.