Urban ethics and theory

One problem with planning, particularly for planning in the academy, concerns its normative basis: the good city, the just city, etc. Recently, a commenter here said:

That describes what a university SHOULD be, but not what I have found most universities to actually be. Anyone that disagrees with the mainstream academic viewpoint is not engaged in discussion, but shouted down. Students aren’t encouraged to explore and come up with new ideas, but to validate the ideas of their professors. Seems like the “debate” (or lack thereof) is not longer intellectual, but political and ideological.

That comment meshes with my experience in the planning academy, but not my experience with social scientists. Social scientists have their own problems and limitations, but planning’s normative basis means that once consensus forms on what is good, deviations from that will be condemned not as misguided or inaccurate, but as evil. I’m not naive enough to believe the social sciences aren’t subjective or that they aren’t subject to ideological influences. But a common theoretical basis, such as that held in economics (however flawed), allows for deep divisions to run alongside a rigorous body of empirical work. That is, unless you’re in macro, where ideologies rule and big names bellow at each other like mammoths across the primordial swamp about how to interpret theoretical models that have a weak empirical basis.

Not unlike macro, the empirical basis for much of what is held dear in planning is so weak that what emerges is a consensus about preference, not a consensus about the best testable theories to explain the workings of human life or society in cities.

Maintaining a normative consensus values cohesion rather debate, and that cohesion is self-reinforcing because of the size of the field. Economics is big enough so that there are multiple dimensions to that discussion, and if you dissent, chances are there are enough people like you to form a posse. In planning if you dissent, you’re “that pro-sprawl, suburb-loving Republican who doesn’t want what’s right for our cities.” Debate means you will get punished. And while you are being subjected to ad hominem arguments in response to your attempts at debate, you will be told that, of course, debate is valued. Not because debate is really valued, but because people like to think of themselves as open-minded and fair even as they are convinced they are right and really want you to shut your pie hole, but amicably, of course. Now you’ve been listened to. cough.

Perhaps that cohesion is very beneficial to planning practitioners. It could be.

However, in the academy, cohesion valued over debate means that innovation and intellectual rigor are valued less than contributions to validating collective preference. In fact, to the degree that innovation leads to dissent, both questioners and innovations are punished.

Valuing cohesion over those other factors kills a field intellectually because cohesion provides few directions for new scholarship. In planning, are there any debates left? I look around and I see the only people left standing are the advocates who, with a few interesting exceptions, spend most of their time shadowboxing with people like Harry Richardson and Peter Gordon who got bored and dropped their (outward) position of dissent in planning 15 years ago in favor of making contributions to the field of regional science.

So JAPA has a much-ballyhooed issue coming up on sprawl and Smart Growth. I’m really excited about it, except for the fact that every issue of JAPA for the last 20 years has had at least one stylized fact paper interpreted as a causal study about some iteration of Smart Growth. What’s left to say? Maybe some iconoclast will get all crazy and tweak form-based codes! Won’t that just set us a-twitter?

Charles Dickens was born today in 1812, and here we are celebrating. Robert Banks Jenkinson was the Prime Minister at the time. The Pope was Pius VII, O.S.B. The US President was James Monroe, a man that most people couldn’t name on a bet, for all the flouncing around about staying true to America’s founders. (Though, to be fair, the two on either side, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, are likely to eclipse just about anybody save Jefferson).

My point is that we remember Charles Dickens 200 years later because he knew how to tell a story. He knew how to make you care about characters, and how to communicate ethics.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, everybody who has ever said to an English major: “What are you going to do with that?”

In all likelihood, in 200 years, nobody is going to remember you, either, no matter what you do, given how easily very accomplished people disappear into history. So you might as well live the life that matters to you and to the people important to you.

No, you’re not likely to become the next Charles Dickens. But you can always find another way to earn a living if your dreams don’t pan out. If you enjoy comfort more than your art, then you can sort that later by apprenticing yourself to a contractor or a mortician or something more lucrative.

With all the critiques of higher education as a means to get a job, and the constant blather from wannabes and outsiders about how terrible it is to go to graduate school, I was reflecting on a student who is in my class right now. He’s on the USC water polo team; he’s a nice young man from all appearances. I wonder if anybody says “What are you going to do with that?” to him?

I hope not. Because water polo strikes me as really fun, and a good way to take care of your health, even if he never gets a job out of it. It’s already helped him stay healthy and pay for school.

You should think about education the same way. Educational challenges should be fun, and you should use it get your brain in shape. You certainly don’t have to go to school and pay tuition to keep using your brain; but just like lots of people don’t like to exercise alone, classes give you a social setting for exercising your brain.

Getting an education or playing a sport or staring out your window is only a waste of time if you let other people measure your life out for you. I have never done that, and Thank God.

I went to graduate school for the wrong and right reason: to get a job, to become a professor. But I wanted that job for the right reasons: because I wanted to spend my days reading and writing about what I wanted to read and write about.

Now I look back on graduate school as one of the best times of my life. I grew so much. I read, and I argued, I failed, I wrote, I failed some more, and I can’t remember a period in my life when I was more happy and challenged. No, the professors didn’t respect me–and nobody else respected my decision either. Everybody from my parents to random people from yet-undiscovered Amazonian tribes second-guessed my decision. (Except the person that really mattered: my husband). I’m eternally grateful to my professors and peers in graduate school: like every other aspect of my life, my growth was hardly dignified, but it mattered immensely to me.

Of course, I write this as one of the lucky few who did wind up with the job that I wanted. I can understand being angry about not having things turn out that way. What I can’t understand is why you’d ever cheat yourself of the chance to do work that you really, really want to do–to write your own story, the way you want. It’s not about whether the professors love you. It’s about whether you have work that you can’t wait to get up and do.

In the interim, you can take a tour of Dickens’ London.

Ferule and Fescue has a nice meditation up on the nature of scholarly work, and some reflections on how, even if you are writing by yourself, you are being helped out in many significant ways by reviewers and senior mentors.

I have a colleague who is fond of trying to convince us that if coauthored worked should be counted by dividing the number of authors. So if you write with three people, you get 1/3 of journal article.

Of course, he writes by himself.

My report on autism and urban life for the NIH has fifteen co-authors: some from our community partner, some from Keck, an individual from engineering, some folks from Children’s Hospital, and a boatload of my students. It was a large grant, and it had a lot of hands and brains at work on it.

So if I write published articles with just my name on it, would that be an indicator that I am a singular genius working bravely on my very own?

Or would it make me a jerk who takes credit for other people’s work? (Answer:the latter.)

One of my wonderful students sent me this link from Cyburbia about AICP (American Institute of Certified Planners) willingness to grant tenured faculty an AICP credential. Rebecca Retzlaff and Stuart Meck take up the question in this contribution from Planetizen. They use some fightin’ words:

What a fraud and insult this proposal represents to the hard-working planners who have dutifully followed the rules, gotten their education and experience, and have taken and passed the certification examination (and for the planning faculty who did likewise)!

On Cyburbia there’s a lot of grousing on the part of some who are quick to throw poo around the monkey cage: the comments about “just” having your “Piled, Higher and Deeper”, in addition to complaining about how universities would never grant me a PhD “despite my years and years of experience” and how having a PhD is no guarantee of experience.

Hmmmm. If getting tenure at a university is such an easy and dues-paying-free way to get “AICP” after your name, go right ahead and try that route. Steal that nifty credential through the backdoor means of a fast-and-easy academic career. Then please report back to the rest of us on how that worked out for you.

It reminds me a little of one my architecture colleagues from VT who, encountering me writing at a coffee shop during the summer, said, “I wish I could take summers off like that.” Because, in his experience, paper writing was something that took three hours the night before the paper is due in Western Civ—not writing that occurred after you secured a half million in funding from NSF, conducted 300+ interviews over the course of two years, transcribed them, coded them, and analyzed them only then to start drafting something that will go through an extensive peer review process, with the final publication being version number 11 or so. Different worlds: when I draw something, it’s a doodle. Not work.

I’m not saying that attaining an AICP through the standard route is easy–far from it.

But the policy covers tenured professors. Tenured. I was relatively a fast PhD at four years from start to finish in grad school. Four years. Then tenure: five years of hard work on planning research projects after that. We can argue that practice experience and research/teaching experience are not commensurate, but why answering phones in a zoning office is all-that-much-more-valuable to the world of planning than developing new insights into cities is a bit beyond me. Even if you do believe that 10 seconds spent inside a “real planning job”, no matter how prosaic, is more significant than 10 years in the academy, please let’s refrain from acting like people who have worked hard enough to earn a PhD and tenure haven’t done anything with their lives. There’s an unbelievable amount of vetting that goes into tenure.

And please spare us all the “I had a dumb professor once who didn’t know a thing about the hard knocks of my planning life” anecdotes that prove nothing other than the speaker’s willingness to generalize from a cherrypicked example. (As in, you had a bad professor once. Wow. What about all the other professors you had, or the 4000+ you didn’t? All the same as the one you’re focussing on? And your deep insights on what he or she knew were gathered on what? One thing he said once? That’s fair.)

I don’t know why faculty aren’t expected to take the exam for the credential. That seems counterproductive. I suspect it’s because they know full well many faculty wouldn’t bother with dealing with the exam. It’s extra work, and I live in a world where my association with planning is already tantamount to having cooties–i.e., I’m in a policy school dominated by economists and quantitative political scientists who think planning is shorthand for “lousy social science,” all they hear in a conversation about how planning might be different from their discipline is “blah blah blah blah blah planning isn’t as good as my discipline because it’s different blah blah blah blah,” and, since they are in the majority, they define the consensus position about what is valuable, true, and prestigious and what isn’t in our little corner of the academic hothouse (and to them planning is none of the aforementioned, unless the planning is done by economists. Then planning is all Very Important, and Much More Valuable and Effective than if done by planners.) So nothing that increases my association with practitioners in my profession is a positive for me professionally.

The AICP policy strikes me as a strategy to raise the profile of AICP within universities, and to have more influence and dialogue with faculty within universities that are like me: people who are engaged in a career trajectory that seldom touches on planning practice because it’s not terribly relevant to the incentives and culture we face within the university. And we should be worried about planning’s relevancy in the academy more generally. I strongly suspect that in 50 years, academic planning (unless we are very very careful and very strategic) will be swallowed by architecture, civil engineering, and public health. Raising the professional distinctions between planners and the rest of those folks strikes me as a worthy strategy, though I am not sure that AICP designation is the way to do that. And given the perpetual weakness of planners in the academy, maybe it would be fine for the discipline to disappear.

Second, the complaint from Cyburbia that universities don’t grant a PhD for many years of experience is true, but it’s also rather irrelevant in ways that Stuart Meck himself embodies. I zipped off to look at his cv, and he does not have a PhD. He is instead an accomplished practitioner with a B.A. and M.A. in Journalism and Master of City Planning, The Ohio State University; M.B.A., Wright State University–great credentials for doing what he’s doing at Rutgers. Plenty of academic planning programs want great practitioners to teach. But not every practitioner with a bloated sense of the value of their war stories for the young is a great teacher. Yeah, you might be locked out of academic job because you don’t have your Piled Higher and Deeper. Or you might be locked out because you’re not as interesting or as accomplished as you think.

This is all by way of saying I think this kerfuffle doesn’t really matter, it’s not a grand insult or a fraud, and nobody is taking anything away from practitioners who have distinguished themselves with the credential: how many tenured professors are going to use the AICP certification to quit their university job (which, after all, is a life of complete and utter ease) to compete for the staff jobs that are asking for AICP certification? And how many planning directors would hire them if they did? I knew this one dumb planning director once…

The FT this morning has an interview with ECB Executive Lorenzo Bini, who notes:

“To me, it seems that some economists have become increasingly attracted to quick, simple, and shocking answers–just to get the attention of the media and to promote themselves.”

A dynamic hardly isolated to economists, but very apt in its description.