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.