Moving at the speed of billiards.

A friend linked to a blog of gorgeous aerial shots of cities around the world.  These human creations, these living machines of memory and steel, are resplendent.  The heights that people can build and the monuments we can create.

Source: Gadling

They tell you interesting things about places, things you may never expect.  From our mental images of Jerusalem, it's easy to think the entire nation of Israel is a dusty biblical archeology dig.  Then you see a picture of Tel Aviv and are reminded otherwise.

Source: Gadling

But they're as sanitized as the machine drawings in a patent application.  Beautiful and lifeless, little images of a model railroad set.  Over the years, I have become somewhat obsessed with images of Prypiat, the Russian city in Ukraine that served Chernobyl up to it's destruction, and was evacuated immediately after.  These beautiful stills remind me of Prypiat photos.

Source: Wikipedia

Cities are machines like we are machines, living throbbing things that move and grow.  These pictures are as lifeless as ancient religious icons, sapping the life out of the living machines and replacing the awe with sparking gilt.  While the glowing aerial shots make great Chamber of Commerce brochures, true pictures of cities happen at street level, just like the living city does.

Source: Shanghai Scrap

These are men playing carom, a Shanghai version of pool/billiards.  They are in the street of one of the world's busiest cities.  Life here does not happen at the speed of a plane or a car or a swift transfer of finances or the ledger of a ship.  It happens as fast as a checker pushed with a stick.

Amenity of redundancy.

I'm on vacation this week.  Not a big one.  Sticking around the house with the kids.  Doing yard work.  Watching movies.  Staying up late.  Simply not doing anything with regular work.  Not doing the normal routine.

And that's the most important part.  I am vacationing from the routine.

Seeing how much relaxation this offers, how much a difference in thinking and feeling, I can't help but wish there were more alternatives in the routine.

I would love some alternatives to being to work.  We have a very narrow telework policy.  One that keeps you at home, so there's no possibility of working from the library or a coffee shop.  There is more than one slot of hours that work could happen or some flexibility in week schedules.  There are, again, narrow policies allowing these.  But they're set to take hours away from employees, rather than improve work-life balance.

Of course, this gets to not be a routine pretty quick, but I'd make due.  

It gets broader than that, though.  Just getting to work has only one alternative.  There's only one parking lot.  There's only one door to go through.  There's only a handful of places to get lunch.  There's only a couple of places to go during lunch hour.

These are structural things.  So often, we focus on the "mix" of amenities.  Simple alternatives are an amenity too.  The ability to break the routine without blowing up the routine.  I still want coffee, but there's only one place on my one route to get to work.

But we skip on making sure there are backups should the initial mix fail.  A friend asked if he should buy a condo in a particular neighborhood.  It's an up-and-coming place, one with a history of being bad, but now hosts a cluster of nice shops and a movie theater.  All of which are in the same complex, owned by the same group.  I said he should think hard about the purchase.  It has a lot of upside, but it's a monoculture.  There is no redundancy to catch a mistake.

So, my vacation from the office is not about simply being out of the office.  (It's a nice perk, tho).  It's about being out of my routine and away from the bland vanilla of the workplace.  It might be easier to get back to the workplace if it didn't come with so much extra weight.

First is still the best

Today's article is a look at Hong Kong and its expanding influence moving into the Chinese main land.  As the city moves to join other major cities through infrastructure links and employment, the freedoms enjoyed by the residents of Hong Kong stand in contrast to the other residents nearby.

The author tries to bring the concept into an American example.

"Imagine if the various boroughs of New York City all had different political systems, tax structures, and gambling laws, or if Paris’s many arrondissements each had different degrees of freedom of expression."

The interesting oversight of this article is that this situation exists around New York City today.  In talking about Mega-Cities, they forgot about the first one from Boston to Washington.

The various supporting units of New York's system - Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and the rest - do have different political systems, tax structures and gambling laws. It also has a single government overseeing the entire stretch, but real limitations on the localized influence that it can exert.

For the East Coast of the US, the separation actually is a strength.  Weak corporation laws provide protection for companies in Deleware, but its location puts it in striking distance of New York finance.  Pennsylvania countryside can provide the metropolis with farm goods.

Even competition is strengthening.  Alternate ports compete with New York.  But the attributes of the competition (for example, Baltimore's position further inland) allows more specialization rather than Peter directly robbing Paul.

But there is one stark difference between the two coastal conurbations.  The personal freedoms on the East Coast of the United States are unquestioned.  This is not the case with variations between freedoms allowed in Chinese cities.

Transit and housing recovery.

Reports today show that parts of the country are escaping the housing recession better than others.  Even within the areas, some places are more successful than the rest.

One quote caught my eye.

"That fitful recovery is reflected in the Zillow analysis. Homes in sought-after neighborhoods, including those near transportation corridors and with top-notch public schools, are finding buyers. But others in neighborhoods just a few miles away, including so-called exurbs or areas that never fully gentrified, are languishing."

Notice that it says "transportation" and not "transit".  Some of the parts later in the article mention Metro near D.C., but the radio report that sent me to this article really de-emphasized much difference between transit and good highway intersections.

And that is interesting because we, as planners, take it as gospel that transit is better than cars.  But this agnosticism between cars and transit in home purchases really strikes.

Of course, some of this may be skewed.  There could be a stronger rental market near transit, one that doesn't get reflected in these numbers of home purchases.  There could also be a statistically significant separation that is simply not revealed in this reporting (or looked at in the analysis.

But we should not take it for granted that everyone agrees with us that transit is the end-all of home locating.  New job opportunities pop up all the time, and do not have to locate themselves near transit.  People go where there are jobs, or split the difference with with their spouse's work.  Folks who make these decisions are not doing it wrong, they're just doing it different.  We have to give them options too.

Just like the array of ways you have to get on the internet, the best places are those that have an array of methods to get around.  Don't count highways out yet.  Just don't spend all your transportation money on them either.

Always on information flow.

The New York Times ran an article about How Depressed People Use the Internet.  In a survey of undergrads at Missouri University of Science and Technology, the researchers determined depressive symptoms.  They then compared the results to data usage from the school's IT department.

Students who were depressed showed a pattern of internet usage that was heavy on messaging and data sharing, and low on staying in one place for any length of time.  Games and difficulty concentrating sounds a lot like depression itself.

The article wrapped up with some applications for the research, which should be read in light of mental health collapses and shootings like at Virginia Tech.  Their proposal:

"We hope to use our findings to develop a software application that could be installed on home computers and mobile devices. It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression.  [...]Such software could also be used at universities, perhaps installed on campus networks to notify counselors of students whose Internet usage patterns are indicative of depressive behavior. (This proposal, of course, raises privacy concerns that would have to be addressed.)"

The idea of a program doing this kind of assessment on me is not as much of a non-starter as one would expect.  Do it.  Get the information and start compiling.

But tell me before or at the same time as you're telling a doctor.  Let me read the results along with the health practitioner.   This goes for all the measures we're developing with always-on medical assessments.  Tell me and let me digest the information.  The challenge will be making sure that the information is usable when it gets to me.

I look at the top of this page and see one word.  "Dashboard."  It's really a descriptive word wrapping a wholly difficult idea.  What is a dashboard but an output of filtering mechanisms from multiple sources.

It a descriptive word because, for most people over the age of 15 1/2, this is a concept that comes pretty naturally.  A lifetime of half-second glances, and we know wether to change our actions or to start worrying.

But so much of the sensor-to-analysis-to-output system in our cars is simply a black box.  Rumors abound and misunderstandings are easy.  For example, my check engine light was on for a couple of days.  It addled my mind because the car was running well and had just been checked out.

That is what must be avoided in a big data synthesis system.  It's the first rule of Wikipedia: citations needed.  Tell us where the data is coming from and WHY it is pointing in one direction or another.

Baltimore's Klout score is nominal

Reading through a recent magazine article, I ran across a discussion of Klout.  It wasn't something that had popped up on my radar at any time.  Folks I know don't really engage in it.

I took great pride in the fact that, at several points in school, I was the most mediocre.  Out of 257 people in class, I was number 129.  There were 128 people above and 128 below me.  I was on top of the bell curve.

Klout is measured out of 100, with a couple of weighted measures fed into a black box and out comes a number.  Given my history at the pinnacle of average, I pulled my accounts onto Klout, looking for a solid 50.  I did not get that.  I got a 10.

Yes, a 10.

Which, of course, pushes me to write the whole enterprise off as fart sniffing.  What utter type-A personality circle jerking that feeds the instant-gratification need in a way that is only slightly less indefensible than clicking on a cow.

Fuck them.  At least the cows were commentary.

Until you think that we do this every day for places to live.  We develop any number of arbitrary metrics to rank and parcel out perks to communities.  Klout is simply doing the same thing to people.  Who are you by who has heard of you?  Well, look at the data, it's all there.

I talk a lot about data.  And I believe in using data to make places better.  But we understand that, while the data doesn't lie, we do.

Boomtime in the Oil Shale.

You know when you hear a couple of things from disparate sources that suddenly gel in your mind in a certain way?  Had one of those experiences this morning.  It came while listening to a recap of last night's NBA Finals game.

We'll start before that.  A few weeks ago, I got to sit in a meeting with a developer for some property in the DC area.  They come from Canada, Edmonton and Calgary to be precise.  Having some experience with the good people of Canada in that area, and noticing the very deep pockets and real estate interests of these folks, I said one thing immediately: Oil Money.

Yesterday, driving into the office, a report came on NPR about the up-and-coming city of Cleveland.  A lot of Northeast Ohio is seeing a boom in incomes and business.  But hearing this, I said it again: Oil Money.

Then, this morning, I listened to the breathless recap of the Oklahoma City Thunder's victory over the Miami heat.  It's hard to remember, but that OKC team once belonged in the Pacific Northwest.    Once more: Oil Money.

That kind of click was an interesting one.  We think a lot about the winners and losers in the battle to be, become, or remain successful global cities.  There are plenty of measures of up and coming or boomtowns.  Oklahoma City and Cleveland are well down the list.  

Let's think for a minute about what fracking and the oil shale boom are going to do to cities.  Here is a map of the big locations for oil shale across the United States.

Shale "Plays" - locations for exploration.  (GAWDA)

Most notable is the big red blob in the north east.  It obscures many of the old Rust Belt cities, who are desperately looking for employers and income.  Industry left these areas and they have been struggling to reposition themselves in a new economy.

Well, what if they didn't have to reposition that far.  What if a lot of that industrial infrastructure that is sitting dormant can be re-fired to start new life in oil, rather than coal or steel.  These original boom towns may once again find themselves, well, booming.  

One last point.  Three of the four states mostly covered by the Marcellus shale deposit (Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio) voted for Obama in the 2008 election.  Make no mistake he remembers that, or their 73 electoral votes.

Boom goes the sandbox.

A cool bit of news from the world of video games, specifically old school Civilization II.  This from Reddit, where a submitter has played the same game of the world building sim for 10 years.  Now in the year 4000, the planet is an environmental wasteland of misery, poverty, and war.  No real improvement or development is possible, as all resources are locked in combat with the other nations or cleaning up the last round of ice cap melting.

Awesome.  I love Civ, and could never get enough of moving through the development tree and wiping out enemies.  Until I raised the difficulty level and was destroyed in three turns by the AI.

One article about this fellow's dilemma actually looks at the AI for some of the issues.  From io9.com:

One way to look at it would be to decide that the game systems have hit their equilibrium point: the three remaining nations are locked in a cycle because of scripted AI behavior in the face of a world that cannot have any further technological innovations discovered or resources uncovered. The game has hit its breaking point; the walls of the sandbox have been found.

The image of pre-established rule bound entities being locked in such a stalemate is a very interesting one.  That the stalemate actually illustrates the box they're in is a phenomenal concept.  It's like using dynamite to measure the depth of a bathtub.

This is exactly what is going on in the office right now.  I am a bit of an interloper at work.  I move between the planning work and the development management work pretty easily.  That can also be read as I am a free agent, not trusted by either side.

And they are sides.  Most people don't know the difference between those two halves of the planning profession.  If you're in a planning department, you're a planner.  But there are groups of folks who use professional experience and community outreach to establish what goes where. And there are others who apply those visions to tangible permits and applications.

Ideally, these should feed back and forth between one another.  But they do not.  They are little fortified fiefdoms.

Now the department is locked in a fierce battle over the rewriting of the zoning ordinance.  This is not a vision document, it is law that puts limits and controls on the ground.  Part of it establishes how plans can establish zones.  The other part establishes how the zones actually effect the land they're on.

The fight that goes into this battle really illustrates the confines of the box.  Our AI that is established by the work we do - vision or development - really is defining the shape of the space we occupy.  We talk about process.  We talk about purposes.  We talk about bulk and setbacks and uses.

But we don't talk about neighborhoods.  We don't talk about architecture.  We only talk about economic development or health or poverty in carefully coded words like mixed use or density or affordability.

That is the truly frustrating part.  While the argument does feel artificial, we are true intelligences.  But we're stuck in this very small sandbox of our own making.

Urban DNA

Researchers have used geotagged images from cities around the world to develop software that can identify the little architectural details.  They found enough location sensitive architectural features to pick out which of the dozen cities they examined the photo is from.  Reports in Planetizen and New Scientist point us to the research.

Pretty interesting stuff.  Pretty crappy title from Planetizen.  A city's DNA isn't found in its balconies or its bay windows or its stoic columns.  Those are just window dressing.

There really is a genome to cities.  There are underpinnings, snippets of code, base processes that make unique places.  But they're only evidenced by architecture in the most remote and detached extrapolations.

Let's think about Paris and the gable roofs and the stout buildings and the tree lined boulevards.

Let's think about New York and the wedding cake architecture and the open plazas at the foot of massive towers.

Neither of these things were driven by some conspiracy of architects to make a city look like a particular city.  The were driven by the zoning laws that the architects were responding to, which themselves were based on

When you're looking at architecture, you're looking at an end result.  You've gone through financing.  You've gone through need.  You've gone through law.  These are the things that make up the genome of a place.

And, what's better, we're getting closer to deciphering that genome.  They did this through data mining, running geotagged pictures through software that recognizes   This type of technology is going to be fantastic, when it's connected to something deeper.

Guess what else is geotagged?  Zoning ordinances.  Development applications and approvals.  Permits and legislative decisions.  Ownership records, deeds, mortgages, wills.  Reams of paperwork that themselves can be tagged and compared between places.  That is true DNA.

The Vicious Cycle.

This is the most gleefully whimsical little video I've had on repeat for a while.

Hard to remember being that small, or the the utter surprise of true hide and seek.  I love how she goes to the last place she saw her father.

But, of course, I picked up on something else - what appears to be a successful family living in a pretty cozy apartment.  Nice stuff.  The dad is involved in some pretty interesting tech work (prompting the video).  All sharing a bedroom and some limited space.

We have a couple of little ones, and moved out to the suburbs to give them enough room.  It's a very American way of thinking about it, and one that I wish we could shake.  There are four of us in a 2,000 square foot house.  I'm not convinced we need this much interior.  We also have a quarter acre of land.  I'm not sure we need this much exterior either.

There is a 45 foot wide road in front of the house with a 25 mile per hour speed limit.  People read the size of the road, the big line down the middle, and floor it.  Our road leads to an even larger divided arterial.  That leads to an even wider freeway.  You have to cross all of these things to get to the nearest convenience store.

Another way of thinking about it, between me and that convenience store are 75 houses.  If we were all in apartments like the one in the video, we could actually walk to the store.  And if we were walking to the store, our roads wouldn't need to be so big as to accommodate all the people driving to the convenience store.  Which would make the walk to the convenience store even nicer, prompting more walking, and so on.

Walking.  Reasonable living.  Nice places.  Truly a vicious cycle.  

Tumbleweeds of information

So, I typed the words "big data" into a couple of search engines at the library today.  More questions appeared than answers.  Out of 172 general articles that came back, 150 were three pages or less.  Where they exceeded three pages, we looked at 20 articles that were surveys of surveys in biological or chemical sciences.  The other two were about the information systems solutions to big data problems.

A separate search of law journals turned up 19 articles.  All of them were about the legality of data mining.

We, as planners, are not piecing together the potential for this resource.  We are not listening to our friends in biology and sociology who are starting to aggregate real data clusters in a whole.

And that's a damn shame, because we are where the rubber hits the road.  Of all the social sciences, city and urban planning is the one field where law and policy manifests itself in a measurable group of setbacks, density, development, and population.  But it's a lonely field.

And we are the place where real surveys of data should be taking place, but they are not.  So, it drives me to another question: why am I looking at this?

Big data is the frontier of urban planning.  We have two choices: become technocrats or become obsolete.  We can talk a big game about working with communities and building places and all the other stuff, but if we don't have the data to back it up, we're going nowhere.

The funny thing is that I would not have said that six months ago.

Truthfully, we shouldn't be here.  We should be able to move through a community and listen to people, read buildings, and feel the beat of the place and what makes it move forward and forms its heart.  

That time is gone.  It's not gone because of anything we did.  We did not fail.  But the world moved around us.

We have to take the vernacular of the day and use it to our advantage.  We have to take the 1s and 0s that move the economy and opinion and debate and steer them towards the arguments that we need to make.

All is not lost because this is what we do.  We were the first arbiters of feedback.  We were the first ones to look at honest places and talk about what they mean.  We were the ones who could discern where paths go, where hardship was settling, and where things were improving.  We could only feel the trend, but not delineate the potential.

We just never had anything beyond our own gut feeling to justify it.  UNTIL NOW.

Now we have data.

Now we have numbers.

Now we have surveys.

Now we have research.

Now we have objectivity. 

Now we use them to push the point home:   Cities are alive, they matter, and they will make you better.

A couple of things occurred to me today.

1) Most of the research into Big Data concerns how to deal with it.  But I haven't found many that describe it.

2) Given the amount of information that some of these things represent, folks are sticking to simple tasks.  Word counts, proximities, relationship things.  I wonder if there is value in applying the same principles to the wave of information being derived, then doing it again, then doing it again.  All that can be happening while wave after wave of analysis happens on the original set, based on the secondary and tertiary analysis.

3)  I wonder if there is a way to prepare data to become Big Data.  Not just scanning text into the computer, but taking some of this initial parsing and using it as metadata.  Of course, the metadata becomes big enough, you face the same problems.

The shape of things is still amorphous and out of reach.  I am going to take some time at the library tomorrow, and see if I get a better grip on things from there.

Today's normal blogging is interrupted to discuss the passing of Ray Bradbury.

I was a late comer to Bradbury and Vonnegut, and I got to them by falling through Ellison.  During my youth, I spent a lot of time with Asimov and Adams.  The stories were more accessible and funnier.  And shorter.

Sometimes I wonder if that last part has continued to impact the way I think.  I have always found it difficult to get quickly into a book or move through it at any speed.  I can pile through articles , but novels and long journal pieces take serious work.  I've had to gear up to cope with the longer reading as I've moved through school, padding the work with notes and underlines, just to keep up with the narrative.

It's not that I don't like reading.  But something seems lost on me when it takes so much effort to process the words and pull the story out of them.

So, I would likely never become one that memorizes a book from end to end.  Do you think they enjoyed the story?  Do you think they liked the words?  Probably not, as the were just a memorized sequence.  Maybe that work would make me the perfect person to be a memorizer.

Planning for Big Data

The buzzword/hot concept for the year is Big Data.  Internet did it.  Business does it.  Government is getting ready to do it.  The IT world is aflutter with the idea.

What is interesting is how little of the concept trickles down to the minions in the field.  What in the world is this big data stuff?

The basic concepts circle around volume, velocity, and variety.  There is a lot of digital information.  It is moving quickly.  And it comes from multiple dissimilar sources.

So what?  This is stuff for Amazon to use in deciding what book to recommend or DARPA to use in tracking terrorists on Twitter.  As a planner, I'm stuck with writing a new staff report, and that DOES NOT move quickly.

But in this talk, physicist Kyle Cranmer breaks down how the LHC is using big data in big science.  He suggests that hypotheses are no different than business models or policies.  We can use big data to confront all sorts of ideas.

And we do have big data.  Zoning ordinances, all of them, from all across the country.  Written journal articles.  The entirety of land records.  GIS data.  All those staff reports.  Sure, it's not 140 characters long.  It will take a different kind of architecture to deal with these.

Think what would happen if you had a nationwide set of all single-family detached zones.  You could appreciate the differences in terminology from across the country.  It would show the duration and durability of the zone based on the number of amendments.  Aberrations where one city allows, who knows - tanneries - in their zone would stand out.

But part of Big Dat is not just having that set.  It is making that set ready to connect to others.  Combine that Single Family Zone analysis with earlier versions of the ordinances and look how the terminology evolved.  Combine it with the staff reports to see how these have been applied, or variations in how they are interpreted.

Combine the whole set with land records to see if amendments to the zoning were reflected in the layout of lots.  Go back to the policy decisions to know if the policy in one location was more effective than in another. Combine it with sales data to see if this is the development that people want.

Big Data is not about numbers.  It is about layers.  It is a concept that planners are intimately familiar with, drawing information from novel sources to develop new concepts.  But it is going to be at a whole new scale.

Expert in the field

It's been a very long time since I wrote daily.  That is not entirely true, as I do churn out fifteen hundred words a day for work.  But to sit down and actually set aside time to write, that has been a while.

I'm fumbling, not totally ready to commit to a story or an arc.  So why do this?  To get into a routine.  To get past the embarrassment and self-doubt.  And to practice.

Then there's a cover  where Christopher Hastings, the writer of Dr. McNinja, says "I got tired of wanting someone's permission to put out my work."

Let's look at the list of permissions that my work needs before it is put out: project facilitator, project manager, planning supervisor, planning chief, publications department, publications supervisor, deputy director, and director.  That's eight, and we haven't even gotten to the elected officials.

I had an interesting conversation today with a co-worker who really was hostile to putting a lot of personal information online.  We talked through generational differences and some of my concerns about floating different information on line.

Then I pointed out the issue of self-branding.  How ambitious professionals are going to have to promote in the digital age.  We're going to have to put ourselves one line, not the self-immolating celebrity style gossip dumps, but a constant stream of work in multiple forms.

Old systems that prevent that, including staid academic journals, are being destroyed.  There is no hope that a backwards backwater government bureaucracy is going to survive.

So that's why I'm here.  There's voice things and practice things and simple routine things.  And a whole lot of request for patience.

Carry me home.

Do you realize that we are not young anymore?

By the time we know that planning is an option as a career, we are past the age of consent and the proclivities of youth.  Planners are old by default.

By the time we are done planning school and moving towards an actual career, we are deep in our twenties.  We shift and move, but it's not because we want to, it's because we have to.  There is someone at home.  We are not simply detached anymore.  We are settling.  Planners are old by conformity.

By the time we have some experience and can sway opinion, we're forty.  There are responsibilities.  There are roundly held opinions.  There are places we go for guidance and for censure.  We have internalized them.  Planners are old by contrition.

And by the time we have moved buildings, pushed design, or adapted zoning, we are well past fifty.  Planning is a slow profession, and we are the slowest projects.  Planners are old by consensus.

There is no young planner.  We can glow brighter than the sun, but it is not tonight, and it is not in this field.

Novel Sacred Unique

Do you ever get stuck in a loop? A searching loop.  One of the ones where you seem to keep searching forever.  More importantly, where you COULD keep searching forever.  There are some subjects of such depth that you just want to keep looking until you find the bottom.

You know the questions that prompt these.  "Who was the best..."  or "Who made the perfect..."  The answer is not roundly shaped or functionally adept.  More importantly, it is not there.

Why do we want the perfect answer?  Why do we even try?  Because of our desire to defend.  We defend space and we defend ideas.  We want to defend a turf of ideology.  We want to plant our flag.  And we want to defend the ideal that we have found the insight - not just the example - that is the key to something more.  This falls into both.

But every once in a while, we do better.  And that is not just staking out our own ideals.  Sometimes, more importantly, we defend the novel.  We defend the new.  As Anton Ego said in the fabulous film Ratatouille, "There are times when the critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."

God help us when we find such things.  Not that we are protected, but that we protect the sacred, the novel, and the unique.

That's the way we were in Pasadena

I was discussing the difference between Planning and planning with the wife today.   She has been looking at our finances, and worries that we are within a hair of the end result.  She made the caveat that "I'm planning, not like you, but I'm planning."

My response was "my margin of error is 50,0000 people over 20 years.  Yours is within a nickel over the next month.  The difference is different."  To wit, we end up with another question of what Planning is.

I refer back to the invisible Beatle, Mr. Harrison.  "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."  The vast majority of the time, we write plans that seem to identify an outcome, but don't really specify a result.  We don't really know where we're going.

And guess what.  Any road will take us there.

This mindset is a killer.  Very few of us have any idea what the end result should be.  And I mean TRUE end results.  Not something simple like "should this be a location for retail"  or  "we need TOD."  We never specify that "this will be a good place to live," or "this will be a good place to work."  To often, we pander to the "market."

To be honest, there is no market.  There is only people making money.  To be true, I am a planner and I have no idea what I want.

But I have a hell of a lot of ideas on how to get there.  And that is the benefit and the cost of capital-P Planning.  We know good ideas.  We should identify our biases.

We have to start specifying the roads we want to take, rather than the outcomes we want to see.  I frankly don't care if we flood the market with single family detached dwellings.  Just don't consume the epic amounts of land to do it.  I don't care if we get tons of big box stores.  Just don't destroy everything to get there.

And that is the true request: Say what you truly want.  The killer is whether your community can get to the point of formalizing such a statement.