A PLANNER’S PRAYER

Next week, Jews around the world (including myself) will spend the day in synagogue for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.  On that day, we will pray for forgiveness for our sins.  One Yom Kippur prayer, the Al Chet (Hebrew for “for the sin”) lists a variety of sins, requesting Divine forgiveness for each. (One English translation can be found at www.chabad.org/holidays/JewishNewYear/template_cdo/aid/6577/jewish/Text-of-Al-Chet.htm )

What do planners do? Last month I highlighted the findings of several surveys of planners aiming to identify core skills for the workplace. They highlight the importance of skills in communication, information analysis and synthesis, political savvy, and basic workplace competencies and attitudes. In all these surveys, however, the ability to write well is at or near the top in each case.

Almost a month into planning school, I can see the profession’s all about improvisation. How do you think on your feet when a client doesn’t like your design? What other cities can you turn to when a sudden mandate comes down to look for policy innovation?

Or let’s say you’re a planning professor. The financial markets have started a tailspin, eating themselves alive and swallowing MBAs whole. How’s your lesson plan gonna change?

Last Thursday night marked the end of an intense two-week team project in my Gateway: Planning (a kind of Introduction to Planning) course.  In this project, my classmates and I assumed the role of consultants to a fictitious working group of the real-life New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) and prepared and delivered oral briefings on key challenges to post-Katrina housing recovery.   

In thousands of planning and zoning laws across the nation, official announcements are required to be published in the local newspaper of "general circulation." In an era of newspaper decline and expanding diversity of media, are these laws becoming obsolete? Furthermore, should we be concerned with newspapers at all if a newer, more universally accessible medium is available: the Internet?

A variety of announcements are legally required to be published in a local periodical of "general circulation," sometimes in addition to being published in an official government gazette. The practice entered the planning world through the U.S. Department of Commerce's highly influential standard zoning and planning enabling acts.

I've always wanted, but never quite had the cred, to go to Burning Man. Instead, I went to this year's rendition of National Park(ing) Day in the hopes that it would provide a reasonable, if diminuative, substitute in temporary parks across the country. Creative minds can do a lot with 180 square feet, especially when there are straight-laced passers-by to shock and paradigms to subvert.

The on-going foreclosure and subsequent credit crisis should offer important lessons for housing policy and public policy more broadly. Chief among these lessons might be the falsity of the notion that government regulation is always bad. But some conservative commentators cling to the dogma that government intervention is the root of all evil. An explanation being offered by some is that government intervention in the form of Community Reinvestment Act encouraged irresponsible lending and led to the subsequent housing bust.

With the subprime mortgage and housing bubble crises now metastasizing into the full-blown implosion of the U.S. economy, global markets have been gasping to keep up with the turmoil. Later this week Congress will be pressured to approve a mind-boggling $700 billion "bailout" package which would effectively transform Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. into an "overseer" of the entire economy, with complete and unassailable power to purchase so-called "toxic" debts from any bank he chooses.

Last Friday, I was in two different suburban environments in Atlanta. Both are sprawl by any normal definition of the term - car-oriented environments where residential streets are separated from commerce, sidewalks are rare, and densities are low. But the two places are as different as sprawl and new urbanism.

More than anything, I remember laughing at them. While I, as a bright-eyed undergrad, woke up at 11 to enjoy my very liberal arts classes in everything from gerontology to the physics of music, the business students would trudge out the door in suits and ties. For class. In late-summer Philly humidity. Eighteen years old and already soulless pre-professional slaves.

Poor bastards, I thought.

Now that I’m in graduate school, two things keep the schadenfreude at bay as Wall Street drowns in its own excesses. One, karma’s a bitch. And two, as a soon-to-be planner, I’m quickly realizing I’ve become one of them.

I occasionally get accused locally of being too much of a "booster" for Vancouver's success and reputation in city-building and urban design. Although I usually tend to mix in a healthy dose of "constructive candour" on how we need to improve, if there's truth to this accusation, I'd say I come by it honestly. First off, I've been an admirer and careful student of the Vancouver approach to urbanism, as imperfect as it might still be, long before I arrived in the City as Director.

Starbucks stores have seen a lot of protests. Due to its international brand recognition, the chain became an easy mark for activists looking to draw media attention to concerns from genetic engineering to union busting, from store placements in historically sensitive locations to the company’s opposition to Ethiopia’s application to trademark three types of coffee.

I often hear debates over the costs of different modes of transportation, particularly between driving and public transit travel. Rising fuel prices have made public transit more attractive for some trips, boosting ridership, but critics point out that for most trips, transit fares are still comparable with fuel costs (for example, at $4 a gallon, fuel costs about $2 for a typical 10-mile trip, comparable to a bus fare in a typical city), and generally take longer. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether public transit really saves money.

The battle for the White House has reached my inbox, as even listservs about urbanism crackle with endorsements and denunciations of Obama, McCain, Palin, etc.

But all of this frenzied activity assumes that what a President says or thinks is particularly relevant to urban issues.  But this need not be so.  The policy areas most relevant to sprawl and urbanism, land use and transportation, are not likely to be directly affected by the results of the presidential election.  

In particular, zoning and similar land use issues are generally addressed by state and local governments.  Even the most pro-urban president is unlikely to take on anti-infill NIMBYism (1), make strip malls more walkable. or make streets narrower.  

Earlier this month, researchers performed a test run of a bus that basically drives itself. It follows a line of magnets embedded in the pavement, coursing exactly along its route and eventually to the bus stop. The tiny magnets on the bus and in the street guide the bus to the perfect parking position at the stop for picking up passengers. It's a cool idea, and a lot of transit agencies are interested. But there are wider applications. Take, for example, my neighborhood, where nobody knows how to park.

As the summer winds down, here are a list of the five funniest urban planning videos I've found on YouTube over the years, covering news for Planetizen.

Aloha from Kauai

At the margin of creativity, video can inject commentary, advocacy, and even satire into planning. Activist Koohan Paik has gained notoriety for "Discover Kauai," a satirical look at the effects of sprawl on the Garden Island that sets images of big boxes and fast food outlets against Kauai's peaks, palms, and cultural traditions. "The video took the island by storm," says Paik. "It was a successful catalyst in galvanizing community action against development."

This week will be my first full week of classes at MIT; however, I have actually been here for three.  I arrived into Cambridge at the end of August to attend the weeklong department orientation, which was as orientations are – full of very important yet-easy-to-forget information. Alone, the pressure of learning nearly 65 names can induce periodic episodes of amnesia. 

Deindustrialization has wreaked havoc across many American cities and towns. One only need visit the landscape of the rust belt, places like Buffalo, Detroit or Flint, Michigan to get a sense how damaging this transformation can be. Behind the ugly ruins of abandoned factories and shuttered stores are the lives of real people who have suffered. Manufacturing provided jobs, good paying ones at that, that helped create a blue collar middle class.

 

Blogs are emerging as important information sources in the contemporary discourse on cities and city planning.

Decades after its founding, New Urbanism design movement retains a serious reputation problems among American urbanists. Despite a broad-based interdisciplinary membership, for many the movement is defined by a handful of large, high-profile green field projects like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, and The Kentlands in Maryland. This view ignores its other successes, ranging from overhauling obsolete zoning codes, developing sensitive infill projects, and improving the quality of public housing through the HOPE VI program. However, much more than an unfair stereotype of the movement, the reputation problem runs to the core of intellectual life among American urbanists, speaking to the way our cities our developed and studied.