So, that brings me to another question: What do I value; what is rewarding? The obvious list of things to value comes to mind, i.e. family, love, honor. Then the less obvious list, i.e. beauty and place, equality and justice. Those are important to me. Most days, for the last two years, I have thought about the effect of the built environment on our lives; specifically, on the economy, on our social history, on our health, on our mental health, on our personal energy consumption, on our vehicles and buildings' energy consumption. I am consumed by my interest in these topics and would love to work in a related field.
For a long time now, I've been considering whether it is worth it to turn myself into some kind of expert in infrastructure, economics, architecture, real estate, land-use law or planning (combination of them all, but not as lucrative in itself as a profession as any one of them). I have really struggled with this option. I could choose one of these and make a good living, possibly have some job security and financial security for myself and my children if I choose anything, which means good money. When I came back to Germany to live with my husband, Lars, part of my thinking was that it would be a good idea to take advantage of Germany's affordable university programs. I passed the German-language test, an agency converted my former GPA into the German equivalent, and VOILA! I'm free to sign up for courses.
But what should I study? Is being an expert in any field a guarantee of professional success in achieving the goal of, say, ending urban sprawl? The most influential thinkers in the literature on the topic are themselves avant-garde rebels, who reject the establishment and the Experts.
Here's an interesting quote:
The problem with planning is that it has been overtaken by mathematical models--traffic, impact assessment, public costs and so on, discarding common sense and empirical observation."
-Andres Duany
and,
"The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success." -Jane Jacobs
And I want to be a planner, or some expert? ..... Well, not really!!
It bothers me that destruction can be called "development" and change and preservation can be undervalued. Demolition under the guise of "urban renewal" projects has been for American and German cities the biggest fiend since WWII. I am reading a book by Roberta Gratz called "The Battle for Gotham", which reviews the harm done by Development crusades in NYC and the grass roots fight to stop the destructive trend in planning in all American cities.
The trend in planning after WWII has been (and still is in many places in many ways) to hammer and chisel the car-city out of the cities people lived in, which was very pedestrian and of a small-livable scale. These older businesses made it possible to go to 10 shops in walking distance without getting in a car, so there was no need for a big box-chain store like Wall-Mart. Wall Mart's only competitor in most of America's cities today is another Wall-Mart type store, a K-Mart, Target, Lowe's whatever. A small, locally run store can never compete with the prices of a huge international discount supermarket, like those big box Wal-Marts. But, these small stores continue to exist in city neighborhoods where density reaches a certain number.
This doesn't mean that small towns can't be dense and thereby nurture locally-owned smaller stores, just that it has been easier for planners, developers and everybody else to convert, through zoning ordinances and other mechanisms, the dense urban fabric of human habitation into a car-mobile settlement, not really a city in any classical sense of the word, as far as I can tell, if cities are characterized by commerce and social interaction, and not just by drive-by hello's and big box shopping.
Planners after WWII made it legally possible to change cities and build so speedy automobiles had access in and out of the city, and this was more important than life in the city. But where will drivers (from out of town) park the cars? They need space for parking lots too, of course!
There's a racist component to re-zoning for suburban like living, but I won't go into that here, in this post.
The renewal projects resulting in an amazing amount of New Yorkers dislocation from their neighborhoods as the homes and businesses were demolished to make way for highway ramps and tall "towers in a park", (think Le Corbusier). Fortunately, many of the planning projects were defeated through a very long historical battle between citizens and planners/developers. Roberta Gratz gives some startling statistics from her book to describe the effect of the "urban renewal projects".
"Title 1 of the 1949 Housing Act was the primary vehicle for building middle-income housing on cleared land. Projects removed 100,000 people from Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, and ... created a diaspora of at least twice that number. Site clearance forced out at least 5,000 businesses of all sizes. Municipal experts declared that these losses... were negligible. But in Central and East Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and other minority ghettos, these enterprises nurtures a sizable portion of the black and Hispanic middle class. In other neighborhoods, redevelopments wiped out larger businesses or forced their ruinous shift to other quarters. Job loss as a direct result of redevelopment was between 30,000 and 60,000 in the postwar period. " -Joel Schwartz
"Many poor neighborhoods simply collapsed from the spatial concentration and temporal peaking of these modes of housing destruction. Health areas of the South-Central Bronx, for example, lost 80 per cent of both housing units and population between 1920 and 1980. About 1.3 million white people left New York as conditions deteriorated from housing overcrowding and social disruption. About 0.6 million poor people were displaced and had to move as their homes were destroyed. A total of almost two million people were uprooted, over 10 percent of the population of the entire Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area."
-Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace in A Plague on your houses.
~~~~~~~
"If the ends don't justify the means, what does?"
"When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way through with a meat ax."
"If the ends don't justify the means, what does?"
"When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way through with a meat ax."
- Robert Moses, Master Builder and most influential American City Planer of all time, Democrat and New Deal Development expert.
After reading the last two quotes, I feel angry at Robert Moses, who taught a lot of planners though example and encouragement how to be terrible planners and overstep their jobs. We live in the shadow of the land-use changes they helped bring about by radically changing the way we finance construction of new buildings, renovations of older buildings, zoning and all sorts of other things. I feel totally immobilized- I don't want to be one of these experts for fear of doing it wrong. Just being an expert doesn't mean that you will do good things. If anything, as an expert, you should always listen to the democratic voice....and try not to screw up too many things.
So I really understand the riddle of it all. I get it. I don't want to make changing the political machine my main job. How would I make money? Planner have to compromise. I don't want to compromise.
Also, it is probably boring. I understand that planning requires an understanding of law above all else, which can be boring and dry. Planning requires a sort of commitment to a city or place. You can't be a traveling nomad as I have been. You have to understand a place truly deeply.
I don't think I want to be a planner. I might want to be a designer of sorts, or maybe an analyst, but I don't want to push anything on anybody. And if I do, and fear that side of myself.
But, I do believe that what we need, all over the world, now more than ever, is more of a personal-connection and responsibility for our "places" we visit in our daily lives.
Most of us live in a car culture in American and European suburbs, which keeps us isolated and carries us from Point A to Point B with efficient speed (or so our Transportation Planners assure us), come home to a TV, which only delivers information to us, prepared by other people.
Speaking from my own experience, I have noticed that many of us work in a downtown or some office building and don't have any real personal responsibility or concern for the place we work or the neighborhood the building is in. I have experienced so-called "Corporate America", which demands that workers park in parking garages or parking lots, perhaps crossing a parking lot bridge from lot to tower (so as never to set foot on the street unnecessarily), where workers work in a cubicle and have no time for lunch, so there is little time spent in the downtown or office park, except in the cubicle. Many workers are not connected with the clients except through email or telephone, which makes it easy to care very little about the client.
We need a more democratic society, in which people know their neighbors, and don't just circle around it secluded in a car, isolated from everyone else. I remember the frustration as a teenager of just wanting to go somewhere, anywhere, but not having anywhere to go because "loitering" was not permitted anywhere in town. There was no where to go TO, just roads to drive ON.
I understand the internet, telephone, tv, cars, etc. are now ubiquitous and only a a certain naiveté would allow me to hope that we would not embrace it all. But I don't embrace it all, and I am not unique. Many productive people I know simply have no time for tv and watch what they want on computers: an activity, which requires a certain amount of user-friendly interaction. Many people dislike driving cars or can't afford to or are unable to. Eventually we do get old, can't see much. Some of us are too young to drive, or some of us are sick and disabled. We can't ALL be drivers!! Unless the definition of "ALL" in our culture only means "person with car", as it might, since our form of personal identification is currently equivalent to a driver's license. In a more civilized country, the sick, old, disabled and young would continue to live normal lives without feeling like they have no freedom of movement because they cannot drive.
I digress. Surely planes and trains could replace long-distance travel, and walking or biking (or light rail/bus) for short-distance travel is a healthy alternative to driving for those of us who are not yet too old, too young or physically unable to drive. It also saves us money. We surely do invest a lot of energy and worry on "Energy-politics" and alternative energy developments, but what if we just don't need so much energy in the first place? Why do I need to walk on a treadmill, instead of the street? The treadmill requires lighting in the gym, gas for my car in order to go to the gym, electricity to run the machine, and paid employees to make sure I am a gym-member? Who pays for the road to take me to the gym? I have to pay car insurance and maybe health insurance. I have friends who went bankrupt from medical bills following a car accident. Who pays the cost of the car-culture?
I would rather just go for a walk in my neighborhood and frequent a locally-run shop or eatery, magazine shop, cafe, whatever, run by a neighbor or local, who I might know by name, and get get out of the house, without endangering my life. I might find out more about what is going on in my town/city and we might, together, start to care about each other and about ourselves, in a meaningful way.
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