Go (miles and miles to) Fly A (gold plated) Kite

I took the day off today to stay home with the two little ones.  As we had recently watched Mary Poppins, one question has been repeated at every free day, half-free day, completely booked day, school day, work day, and immediately before bed:

"Can we fly my kite."

The morning was balmy and stagnant.  Not good weather for flying or for curly hair.  We had a couple things to do, including a library book return and lunch with mom.  But after naps and an afternoon rainstorm, the weather improved for kite flying.  Sunny and clear with a constant, but not too hard breeze.

But where to fly?

We are lucky enough to live in a county and a community with substantial green space.  We have a preserved floodplain to the rear of the house and a lot of trees throughout the community.  There are plenty of sidewalks (although narrow).  And our yard is pretty big.  But the entire area is covered by trees, cut up by small lots, and crossed by power lines.  There are not the kind of big, treeless rolling plazas that are great for people watching and sunbathing and flying kites.  Maybe we were not settled by enough Brits.

Or, it's almost a perception issue.  Those are city parks.  The ones with iron fences and stone walls and well known designers.  We suburbanites need parks to drive the kids for soccer, drive the kids for playdates, or drive to do the exercise circuit.  It is not a casual place.  It is a place for Exercise.

I'm beginning to believe that the driving isn't what is killing us, it's the expectations we build up on the ride.  We eat more at restaurants because we have to get in our car, unpark, drive, turn, drive, stop, repark, and walk across a thousand yards of tarmac before ordering.  There are expectations involved.  By the time I've done that, I want the best damn burrito ever.  And I eat accordingly.

When we get to parks by driving, we want the best damn park ever.  We want manicured ball fields, or stimulating and intricate tot lots.  We want the destination to be worth the effort to get there.

Really, I just want an oversized lawn.  But we decided to use the ball fields at a regional park about a mile and a half away.  The distance and the size of the roads to be crossed precludes this from being walkable.

And yes, the most important thing is that the girls had a magnificent time.

Tear down the university with the statue

Everybody lies.  Sometimes, when we look back on those lies, we wish we hadn't done it.  Sometimes, when we look back on it, we see the damage that we created.  Sometimes we see both the regret and the damage.


That's what I think about when I look at Penn State and the line of troubles that have come out of the attempts to cover up child rape.  Let's not sugar coat what was done by saying "the tragedies" or "the bad stuff."  It was child rape.  It was sexual acts committed against minors by an adult male.  And it was hidden, and therefore permitted, by other adult men who held power in the university and the town.


A real fulcrum here is about where the people stopped and where the institutions began.  Was Joe Paterno the person, or was he the Coach of Penn State Football?  Was Graham Spanier the person or the President of the University?  Did they have a duty as a human, or did they have a duty as the head of an organization? 


We create institutions to prevent individual error from spiraling out of control and damaging more people than a single act by a single person is worth.  Institutions - corporations, universities, cities - are beings in their own right, created as entities to hold property or be sued or take action.  They are beings with a purpose, established by charter and protected by law, set in place to protect people. 


But sometimes the damage is because the institution stops protecting humans, and turns to protecting itself.  At that time, the institutions have failed.  When the preservation of the institution trumps all the humans nearby, the institution is a destructive force.  


It is these institutions that must be utterly demolished.  To look at an institutional culture that allows child rape is to gaze in the bloody maw of a destructive organization.  It is telling that we are not actually talking about deconstructing the entire organization of the university.  We should be ready to ask how this should be destroyed, not whether.  We treat institutions reverently, even when they don't deserve it.  

City skies, little windows

It's possible to go through some days without actually looking at the sky.  Between looking at the road, or looking at the sidewalk, or looking at the lawn, we might spend the day without looking up.

This is more acute that my phone can tell me what the sky looks like.  There's at least 74 apps for telling the weather.  Hell, I even got that star app.  I asked Siri what the weather was the other day.  "The weather is clear and 90 degrees," she said.  It was raining.  Tonight, it's just the opposite.  The doppler radar is showing a big cluster of rain.  But it's not moving.  The ever-present summer pall of haze is clowning the radar.

Spent the entire day today thinking about the future.  Being a planner, that is what we tend to do.  But I forgot to look up.  At no time today did I actually look at the sky.  Didn't even look at the ceiling in the office (not that peeling stucco is much to stare at).  All the future thinking was done crouched forward and pointed at the monitor or the person across the table or marching down the hallway.

Focus is good, but it feels like I failed to aspire.  In the press to lurch ahead, there was no time taken to simply look up.  That does not make a Happy Planner.

City kids and suburban kids

Due to a recent row in city hall, Toronto is discussing the relative merits of raising children in the city versus raising them in the suburbs.  On the side of the suburbs were two brutal shootings.  Supporting kids in the city, diversity:

So I hold no aspersions that small towns or suburbs are necessarily safer than cities. But, more importantly, I believe the benefits of bringing up our son Emile downtown vastly outweigh the fears stemming from these recent acts of senseless violence.

I’ve met small-town folks who can’t imagine the horrors of living in Toronto, much less downtown. But what they don’t see is that their own life experience is limited by homogeneity. 

We don't live live in downtown Baltimore for several reasons.  First, we don't work there.  Second, there are not enough amenities to outweigh the costs.  None of the reasons involve diversity.  Unlike Toronto, the majority of our diverse areas are actually suburbs.

And those costs do include crime. Here is your obligatory Baltimore murder map.  But that is a type of crime that didn't enter our consciousness. When we did live downtown, our house was broken into while we slept upstairs.  My car was hit once.  Our roommate was mugged.  That is on top of the number of times we were accosted by random nonsense while simply trying to get through the day.

The suburbs are not easy.  We spend incredible time in our cars and tending our yard.  But the city is going to have to present some really good reasons to come back in - better than happy cooing diversity - to get our kids back in the fold.

No more zombie cities.

I have been reading a lot about motivation and productivity.  One of the most interesting things to float to the top has been the Cult of Done.  Essentially, the idea is to do it now, short circuit all the things demanding perfection, and move on to something else.

From: brepettis.com

Tactical urbanism has also floated to the top of my reading list in the last little bit.  "Quick, temporary, or cheap projects that aim to make a small part of a city more lively or enjoyable."  It's turning pavement into a temporary park or reclaiming a street for people.  They have a manifesto too.

From: Pics of Trees

Tactical urbanism takes the Done Manifesto and beats old planning over the head with it.  While planners sit and wade through the Process, the small and quirky projects are actually making cities better places to live.  Temporary?  Sure.  Whimsical? Yup.  Finished? Yes.

Why can't planning understand how the perfect is the enemy to the city itself.  Our plans have to be perfect.  Our outreach has to be perfect.  Our surveys, letters, flyers, presentations, everything has to be perfect or it doesn't leave the office.  We protect ourselves from being told "no" or being by trying to find the perfect answer.

But what is less perfected than building a city?  Once a city is perfected, it is dead.  Then we planners make the poor thing lurch along until it bites another city and passes its bad zombie city germs on to the next place.

Or we dissipate, and are actually the zombie city pathogen.  Hmmm.  That is one think about a little more.

Can't even get the name right.

In looking through the want ads, it's a little difficult to see why planning jobs are so hard to find.

Nationwide, a search of "planner" hits 20,093 jobs.  A search of "zoning" nets 2,300 jobs.  "Entitlements" gets 5,916 jobs.  Hell, even "urbanist" gets 16 jobs.

Let's start with that last one.  All but two of the urbanist jobs are for a company called Vocus.  They do social network PR and are looking for bus drivers, sales managers and accountants.  Why do they come up in a search for "urbanist"?  Because their headquarters is "new-urbanist" and they've included that fact in their business blurb.

Looking at "entitlements," the first four entries are nothing planning related.  Only the fifth one, an Entitlements Manager for a big home developer, involves planning and zoning issues.

(I've become very interested recently in how the word "entitlements" has been adopted into the planning lexicon.  That's a story for another day.)

"Zoning" starts with a planning job, peripherally.  It's dealing with due diligence for a retail chain.  A couple of notches down are zoning inspectors for Smyrna, Georgia and Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Between those are multiple positions with computer systems and data storage.  For computers, zoning is about balancing loads and storage in a network.  And there are a lot more IT jobs out there.

That first one, the "planner" search with 20,000 jobs?  Most of them are for Buyer/Planners and Planner/Schedulers.  These are product and inventory moving jobs.  They've nothing to do with city planning.

(And, for what it's worth, putting "city planning" in quotes like a good boolean only yields minor improvement.  The number of jobs available are 63 with the first four being non-planning related.  The first seven are unrelated, if you exclude city clerks and administrators.)

But then you type in "lawyer" or "accountant" and there is no question about the jobs that are being listed.   You get well down both of those pages before hitting your first entry about "working for lawyer" or "assisting the accounting department".

The upshot here is that we are not very good at defining who we are as planners or what we do in our daily work.  For those looking for jobs, that is a doubly harsh.  The digital parsers that are looking for matches between your resume and the job description are indiscriminate.  They don't care about controversy in our field.  They just reject you.

If the computers do not respect your work, how can you respect your job.