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.