Stats and the lies we tell ourselves.

In one of the more insidious bits of political data steering, the North Carolina General Assembly is proposing to limit the type of data used by planners to make predictions about sea level rise.  The limitation states that only past data can be used to make projections, not models.

It would be easy to bang on the head of these folks for being so naked in their manipulations.  They are avoiding making hard decisions in the hopes that the rising tide will just skip the entire state.  As a professional that uses statistics and projections and models to compel good planning decisions, this is infuriating.

But it is truly difficult to be completely offended because things like this happens all the time.  Jurisdictions pick and choose the most pleasant or self serving data to "prove" their points.  Many central cities have been throwing out projections for growth for the last fifty years, although they've been hemorrhaging people.  Adjustments are made to ridership projections to get new transit pushed through.  Even the average tree size is a little lie told to make things better when laying out a parking lot.  Those trees will never attain full growth, but we carry on like they will.

However, what should be disturbing to planners is that we most frequently do it ourselves.

One of the powerful tools that planners use to develop visions for communities is highlighting or suppressing feedback.  When we survey an area, experience and education tell us what to report back to the community and elected officials.  There's a little mysticism and a lot of training that help us pick out pathways and opportunities for development. Often, the things we don't like - big box retail or parking, to name a few - get suppressed in the name of planning orthodoxy.

Once it enters the black box of a planning mind, we do have biases that take over.  We are biased towards sustainability.  We are biased towards transit.  We are biased towards best practices.  Those are not minor data steering filters in their own right.  They run in the thousands of dollars for staff time, millions for lost opportunities, and billions for infrastructure.  It is not that these are incorrectly spent, but communities are steered towards these expenses without the benefit of complete information.

Indeed, it is easy to get angry at North Carolina when they are simply being overt about the self serving nature of data.  It's really easy because data steering is a power we planners want to keep for ourselves.

   

Royale With Cheese.

It has been almost twenty years since Pulp Fiction came out.  The movie has been dissembled so many different ways, from the fractured timeline to the violence to the literary cursing.  I was watching it tonight and was struck by something for the first time.

Pulp Fiction presents being in a car as a character all its own.

Sometimes films or shows present their settings as a unique character, one of the antagonists.  I do not recall a movie where the act of being in a vehicle is treated as the truly unique setting it is.  In a lot of films, the car is a hook to get from one place to another.  Tolkien made folks walk for months, and a car is usually treated the same.  In movies like American Graffiti, the car is a symbol of virile youth.  Of course, the Road Trip is its own genre.

But for most of us, being in a car is being in a diving bell.  You are moving through space, sealed off from the world around you.  It creates a cabin fever.  You act differently when you are stuck in a car with someone.  You talk about the mundane.  You stare uncomfortably forward, washed out from your encounter with an adrenaline needle. Hell, even the lead up to the famous dance scene takes place in a car (it just happens to be parked inside the restaurant).

We do act differently when we get behind the wheel.  Differently enough to remember the next time we make decisions about driving and traffic while sitting behind a desk rather than a dashboard.  I am not sure if it's the velocity or the freedom or the other folks whizzing by.  It may even be that we drive so much we simply ignore the novelty of it all.  We are not the same people when we become drivers.

Four steps to a productive internship.

We received our shipment of interns today.  They appeared hopeful.  With any luck, this will continue throughout the summer and they will emerge as wholly formed and optimistic planners.  Ones worthy of a entering a great profession.  I will make it my personal mission that their spirits are not broken before they leave the Planning Department.

This will take some effort.  I have been struggling with what to tell them to aid them during their time here.  Some of this stems from recently reading Derek Sivers message to incoming students.  Similar things have appeared elsewhere. It pains me that these things were never sent my way.

Until now.  Here is my message to the interns.

1) Be narcissistic.  We should talk about ourselves for a little bit.  What do you like doing?  What drew you to this field?  What opportunities have you had?  What did you like about them?  What sucked?  Yes, this is planning.  Yes, we are whittling this down to a SWOT analysis.  Suck it up.  We are getting to something.

Are you simply meat?  Are you simply going to be used as cheap labor?  I don't think so.  Stop thinking like a good little minion, and think as someone who is going to be going out into the worst job market in history burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and competing against the perpetually unretired who have fifty years of experience.  Let's figure out your strengths and weaknesses, then get working on them.

2) Let's set some goals for the time here.  Again, this is about YOU, the paid intern looking at your selves and what you will be getting out of the position.  This is about you preparing yourself for the next step in your career.  Here is a theory. Here is another theory. If you don't like them, find another one.

But, again, I don't want to see any goals on here that involve "getting ten pages written."  No.  Make it about YOU.  Start with one simple one, like, "Send follow up emails to ten new contacts."  It is about doing one thing, which is meeting people.  You then have to build on that thing by learning enough about the person to not simply be a poseur.  Then you have to act on both parts by sending a followup email.  The second one should be "Submit for a conference session."

3) Reporting.  This is going to come in two parts: You will have weekly meetings with me first thing on Monday morning.  9am, no excuses.  We will be going over a journal.  That is the second part.  Keep it short, with the list of things you did each day, filled out that day.  This is going to be your running evidence of achieving things.  It is also training you to cover your ass.  If you did it, decided it, or dumped it off to someone else, it will appear in the journal.

4) No crap.  If I see you gaming or goofing on Facebook, I'm going to embarrass you.  Get your shit done.  Get extra shit done for yourself.  Get out of here.  If you need more to do in order to fill the contingent eight hours you're required to be here, let me know.  I have a list.

Now, I have not asked permission to do this, either yours or the supervisors.  But I have been here long enough to know that this place eats your soul.  It takes away the desire to be planners.  I owe my chosen career a productive new generation of planners who are happy to be doing good work.

And I will be doing this with you.  Anything I hold you to, I expect to be held to as well.  

Bastard Bee

There is a thin separation between stand-in and go-to.  We acquire things to stand-in for what we should be doing.  But if they're around, then end up as a go-to.

Case in point.  Honey Nut Cheerios.

Oh dangerous succubus, oh shrew.

We keep a box of Honey Nut Cheerios around as a stand-in for a more reasonable and healthful breakfast.  Under normal conditions, I eat oatmeal and a banana and drink some OJ before heading out the door.  The Brown Box sits on the shelf those days, peacefully waiting until need arises.

But then it starts to beckon.  It speaks to me.  "You don't want those things thinly masquerading as a true breakfast.  YOU WANT THE REAL THING."  I quake.

And so one morning there comes a time when real breakfast is "accidentally" forgotten, and I am left filling a punch bowl with sugar flavored oat rings and dropping my face into it without a spoon.

Sometimes I wonder if Planning is out of ideas.  We have a limited number of set pieces that get new coats of paint every decade.  The worst are the flagship projects - arenas, stadiums, convention centers, waterfront revitalization - that get some current buzzwords tacked on.  Transit oriented.  LEED Certified.  You know the drill.

For example, the proposal for Baltimore's proposed new arena.  For a city that has no professional basketball or hockey, it has the imminent stink of a white elephant.  BUT IT HAS A GREEN ROOF.

What happens if we try something really startling.  Let's not build a brand new arena.  Let's not dump huge sums of cash on untested one-off transit modes.  Let's not sink half a billion dollars into a money losing publicly owned hotel.

These big monsters hit a sweet spot between bulldozer politics and growth machine governance.  We need NEW income to grow.  That new income needs to come from NEW things.  Politicians can attend ribbon cuttings at NEW things.  Ergo, bring on the new arena.

But the concept is so deep in the mold that you can taste the penicillin.  The tacked-on green roof just accentuates how poor the whole idea is.  "How can we spruce up this off-the-shelf design?  Let's add some grass!"

If you're going to blow my money on another boondoggle, at least make it an awesome boondoggle.  Break through the boring. Maybe an arena integrated into an office block.

Or apartments in a second enclosure around the main stadium.

If you think of it, the most ancient of arenas - Madison Square Garden - does just this.  It sits on top of Penn Station, the busiest train station in the country.  There will be plenty of opportunities for transit development, as the new arena is going to sit near, if not at, the new Red Line.

Maybe finding the something to fit with the arena is thinking backwards.  We do not even know if there will be occupants for the arena/expanded convention center.  So we should make the arena the secondary function of the site.  What would be useful here, that an arena can be integrated into?

Increasing Rates of Intelligence

Killer infographic from the CDC about the expansion in portion size from the 1950s to today.  French fry sizes more than doubled.  Burger sizes tripled.  Soda sizes doubled THEN tripled.

This actually brought to mind another graphic, this one from Wired magazine a couple years back.

This shows the cost per calorie of items in the grocery store.  Produce is the highest (2 cents per calorie) and beverages are the lowest (0.2 cents per calorie).  Bread (0.2 cents per calorie) is also at the bottom, while meat (0.5 cents per calorie) is a bit higher.

Some of this has to do with urbanism.  But we'll talk food deserts and nutrition later.  Right now, I just want to admire when smart people translate hard information into beautiful bits of knowledge.

 

Behold the Metatron

It should be said that I really love the work I do.  Being an urban planner is a calling, and one that I take seriously.  When the constant drone of idiocy threatens the work and the community, it makes me very angry.  So that gets prattled on about endlessly.

But cities, building them and understanding them, that is what makes for a Happy Planner.  We get this unique opportunity to step backwards and just observe the glorious machine of human communities.  We don't just watch it work, we try to add in the why and the how.

It's easy to scoff at the utility of planning when the field didn't exist for the first 100,000 years that people built places.  A couple of decades of a profession doesn't offer respectability.  And given the track record, planning hasn't helped itself be a respected field.  When planners turned bulldozers on communities or tried to label places as slums, we lost a lot of ground.  Tore up the roots of the seeds we should have been protecting.  And we didn't pay attention that well when new seeds rooted.  From those vanguard settlers, places that we tried to kill have come back, without our help.

That is the truly amazing part of cities.  Even at their lowest functionality, cities work.  People get where they need to go.  Work is done.  Food is acquired.  Money changes hands.  It may be slow or disjointed, but it all happens.  When the non-functional gets abandoned, new houses go up, roads get filled, changes come fast.

All of which occurs on the surface.  There is the deeper part of the city.  Look hard at buildings and sidewalks and you will find that the city has ways of remembering things.  Bricked in windows talk of changing utility and fashion.  Growing front yards tell of evolving zoning codes.  Bare ruts in the grass show thousands of feet cutting a new path.  This is urban memory, the way the city records where it has been.

Couple that with the city taking action on its memory and current events.  Look at the city as an organism.  There is an urban intelligence, one that reacts to changes, retreats from threats, and actually decides how it is going to survive.  And it does it based on its own history.  

Memory and intelligence.  But no voice.  That is where planners should come in.  We should speak for this emergent intelligence.  We should be its mouthpiece.  

We must do more than chatting up mixed use and transit oriented development and complete streets and the buzzword after that and after that.  All of these things are superficial reshufflings of the houses and roads.  They make nice places.  But it is just for show.  

What we need are new ways to peek into the mind of the city.  

Packing for success.

Perusing the interwebs, it is easy to see the number of people who are into packing things for productivity's sake.  We are supposed pack for the gym, bring in our lunch, have a cool set of gear to ride into work every day.  Even for the apocalypse.

But work is a constant stream of shit.  The assholes are bearing down on you from all sides, and counting the time you spend blinking against your overall productivity.  They look at your bag as a method for keeping you efficiently chained to your desk at lunch.  Or worse, it is a portal between their pile of tasks and your time at home.

Hell with that.  Whatever you bring to work is a lifeline outside of the cubicle maze.  It is a reminder that you are bigger than this place, and you are being kind enough to accommodate them.  Let's pack that work bag to maintain your sanity.

1)  An actual physical book and an actual physical magazine.  Sure, you have a Kindle on your phone.  But you are not here to squeeze your entertainment around their nonsense.  You have an object (book) that has a purpose (to be read).  It does not apologize for that purpose, and you should not either.  Bonus: make it a library book because a regular visit to the library is one of the most humanizing things you will do in your day.  The magazine can be read in the can, should need arise.

2)  Healthy snacks.  This is a tip-of-the-hat to the lunch-packers.  They get one thing right when they say you will feel even worse if you blow through the entire row of sticky buns from the vending machine.  Throw a couple of apples in your bag.  They're robust enough to last a couple of days.  When the tension starts getting to you, tear into one of them with the slow chew. Also works with baby carrots.

3)  That thing you look forward to.  The Appalachian Trail maps.  The kid's coloring.  Whatever you're passionate about.  Sure, it's a screenplay about an office drone that saves the entire universe, bangs the hot redhead in accounting, and delivers a nail chewing one-liner after unloading a clip into the alien boss' face.  But it's YOUR screenplay, not theirs.

4)  Pens.  You should always have pens.

And that's it.  Leave the phone adapters in the car.  Deal with your dirty shoes elsewhere.  There is no mission creep here.

Most importantly, leave no space for them.  Not with some apology of "oh, it doesn't fit" or "oh, my bag is full."  No apologies.  Your bag is full because your life is full.  Now that your day is done, you are taking your things and returning to your home.  They are not invited.

Value. True value.

I have been reading about business recently.  Some have been business theory, and some have been starting businesses or turning your hobbies or hustles into business.

One thing that gets pulled out repeatedly is the concept of adding value.

Of course you want to add value.  Duh.  But it's importance was never at the top.  The actual route to a good business has nothing to do with a good idea.  As I was recently reminded, there are a thousand good ideas a minute in most public restrooms.  Good business has everything to do with adding value.

I don't know where Planners add value anymore.  But in most respects, we are looked at as taking value from a property owner.  No one knows where that value goes, but poof, it's gone.  Just because Planners have gotten to a place.

The American Planning Association sums up planning thus:

Planning, also called urban planning or city and regional planning, is a dynamic profession that works to improve the welfare of people and their communities by creating more convenient, equitable, healthful, efficient, and attractive places for present and future generations.

Planning enables civic leaders, businesses, and citizens to play a meaningful role in creating communities that enrich people's lives.

Good planning helps create communities that offer better choices for where and how people live. Planning helps communities to envision their future. It helps them find the right balance of new development and essential services, environmental protection, and innovative change. 

Planning "works to improve," "enables," and "helps".  We don't do anything ourselves, just point out what others should be doing.  "You, over there, develop economically!"

There is nothing in this that talks about the value added by planners. In this scenario, we're just the Greek chorus, the noise, the static.  We don't move the plot, we are just there, constantly droning on.

One would hope that our professional organization could do a better job explaining the position.

In an interview yesterday, Buck Showalter offered the following answer when asked "what is the toughest managerial job in baseball?":


"Probably managing in Triple A. Believe it or not. It's not to go away from the Major League's, but I think one of the toughest jobs in our sport is Triple A because everybody is unhappy there. We got guys on their way back. You got guys going down. You got guys thinking they should be up. I mean nobody is really happy there and we got a great guy in Triple A in Ron Johnson, who was the first base coach for Boston last year. He has done a great job for us down there. We are really lucky to have him."


I can't help but compare this view of Triple A to the attitude at the Planning Department.  Our jurisdiction believes itself to be the poor sister in a metropolitan area of rich and famous superstars.  Developers talk about the county's cheap land and proximity to downtown, but drop the idea because of bad schools and corruption.  Banks redline the area.  Jobs go elsewhere.  And the politics bears down hard on the Department to make it all stop.


That mentality of "stop" rubs off on our staff.  We have plenty of new planners who are ready to work hard to make a name for themselves, but can't find worthwhile projects in this Department.  Then we have graybeards who stay mute out of exhaustion or anger.  No one wants to be here. Everyone thinks they deserve to be somewhere else.


How to be a happy planner in this situation?

Let me count the ways.

Ran into two articles today that call into question the ways that planners count.


First, complexity theorists deciphered the subway maps of a great number of large cities to discern that they "are converging on an ideal form."  Using hard math, the boffins counted nodes and distances to determine that major city transit systems form a core and branch typology that features node counts and distances that regularly repeat, regardless of the continent the city is located.


This gives hope to, as one of the mathematicians puts it, "make urbanism a quantitative science, and understand with data and numbers the construction of a city,"  Their counts put the width of the city at twice that of the core, and the number of branches as the square root of the number of stations.  All of this represents a crazy regularity amongst some of the most complex systems in the world.


A short walk through the internet later, this Richard Florida piece appeared.   He discusses the limits of counting density as simply being the number of people in an area.  Instead, he suggests, "Too many people today conflate density with height. Real interactive density can be better achieved by other means...The real issue isn’t just height and the massing of people and work, but of enabling interaction and recombination."  He suggests that fostering interaction, wether it be in a downtown, an office park, or a vast open prairie, is the heart of urbanism.  That interaction comes from the places where diverse groups of people meet, mix, and recombine.  Any place that just stacks people will be at risk of becoming a vertical suburb.


The Angry Planner would call bullshit on both of the articles, suggesting that they are so fundamentally wrong that a black pit of despair could not swallow the sadness left in their wake.  The metro system analysis looks at THE MAPS of these systems, stylized versions of a more geographically (and fiscally) based set of decisions.  Mr. Florida has some books to sell, most of which have to do with the awesome economic development potential of hipsters.  In his article, he fails, once again, to see that if every neighborhood has "a community theatre, a coffee shop, an art gallery, two restaurants, a bicycle shop, 10 music rehearsal studios, a church, 20 apartments and a couple of bars," it would still be a geography of nowhere.  Just one with a lot more ironic beards and Pabst.


However, the Happy Planner looks on the bright side of these things.  Planning will not, and should not, be turned into a dismal science.  It should never be all about counting.  Florida can be seen as recommending we count MORE things, different things than what has been counted before.


But we cannot stop with simple counts.  Combine that with the transit piece, and we will have the tools and hard math to look at relationships between these numbers.  This can break down some of the "gut feeling" intuition that planners use to develop recommendations.  It will improve metrics to see wether the recommendations are being successful.  And it will will offer new insights that we have never seen before.


And that makes me a Happy Planner.

While discussing the nation-wide absence of urban planner jobs, I received a very interesting complement.

"There's an advertisement for one position nearby, but I wasn't going to mention it to you," my Project Manager said.  "I didn't want you leaving."

I told him it was the nicest compliment I had received in weeks.

But where have the jobs gone?  Unfortunately, quite a few planning departments are losing staff.  But this is only the latest round.  We are four years into this insane economy, and planning agencies, including premiere ones, have been feeling diminishing property taxes for some time.''

Maybe the field is narrowing.  With growth policy on hold in many parts of this country, there is little need for a bunch of expensive specialists telling houses where to be built.  I have never particularly felt like a trusted member of municipal government.  The field is one that can't point to snow removal or cashed checks to explain what we do.  Our benefits are somewhere down the road, maybe.  We planners are an easy bunch to put on the chopping block.

Or maybe planners are expanding.  Instead of sitting behind dilapidated steel desks with our "DENIED" stamps at the ready, maybe we're starting to appear in other, less regular, environments.   It would be hard to be labeled as planners in those situations, but there could be some telltale signs.

And that's what we will look at here.  Who are today's planners?  Where did they go?  What are they doing?  Plus some other good stuff which I will bring up when the time comes.