Tag: Planning

Robert Moses follow-up

Lisa Schweitzer

ATTENTION CONSERVATION NOTICE: The real lesson of the Power Broker isn’t about urban planning or even centralized planning, both of which have their own internal problems and contradictions the way everything in grown-up life has. The lesson from Robert Moses’ career, and The Power Broker book that details it, concerns public institutions and the power of the state, which anybody associated with the state would do well to approach with fear and trembling if they want to be an ethical practitioner in ANY of the public-serving professions. (That means…all the professions.)

So I got people unsettled over the weekend about Robert Moses by noting that his academic background was in political science, and by putting some fighting words out there:

The whole narrative strikes me more as a lesson power and rationality: If something goes wrong, then the planners did it. If something goes right, the engineers/city managers/real estate developers/economists/architects/community did it right, despite all them dadgum planners.

Well screw that. Robert Moses wasn’t ours and it’s time another intellectual tradition took responsibility for him.

The post had the predictable effect with Twitter debates ensuing, with people telling me that Moses was a planner because he “functioned as planner” and assertions that “Caro or no Caro, Moses was a planner!”

And the debate was the point. People are awfully emotionally and intellectually invested in the idea of what Moses stands for in planning.

But not a single argument convinced me, and I stuck to my guns. Why?

Because my major goal here was to shake people up by exploiting the theoretical ambiguity that surrounds planning to do the *opposite* of what people usually do: reject blame cast on the planning profession rather than project blame onto the profession (Aaron Wildavsky, any one). My argument is that people use the field’s indistinctness to make it into anything they want, and if they want to cast all of government’s and market’s ills onto the profession, there is precious little to keep them from doing so. If something goes wrong with development, it was an urban planning problem–not a problem inherent to liberal progressive politics and managerialism, not a problem with capitalist real estate development, not the wholesale abandonment of the welfare state functions of government institutions that people now expect unregulated markets to provide even though they have never done so in the past (solutions for externalities, for one).

So if a PhD in political science becomes the chairman or director of a bunch of powerful commissions in New York with precious little public oversight, then that must be planning. (BTW, the title of Chairman or Director is a signal to me that you’ve moved into public management. It doesn’t mean there is a Grand Canyon of distinction between planning and public management as they are plenty connected, but still, exploring the connections between public management and planning is a fruitful exercise.)

The argument: he drew lines on a map and planned projects. He didn’t manage or build them.

The response: Engineers, architects, and developers also draw lines on maps and build projects. And they also manage them. So did he.

The argument: He traveled and consulted on planning and infrastructure projects. That’s planning.

The response: If that’s what makes a planner, then there are an awful lot of engineers drawing an engineering salary doing planning all over the place all the time.

The argument: Planners promoted his ideas…

The response: Planners promote Andres Duany’s ideas. Does that mean he’s stopped being an architect and has become a planner? Planners promote Don Shoup’s ideas. Does that mean Donald is no longer an economist? (I’d argue that Donald’s intellectual life, moving from economics and delving deeply into planning produces exactly the sort of fruitful insights that interdisciplinary research should.)

The argument: But planning has become even more technocratic (sends me a link to a gillian-page EIR)

The response: The planning profession is hardly technocratic anymore, and that gillian-page EIR likely employed 10 engineers for every 1 planner, optimistically on the planning side. Engineering has rolled forward out of urban renewal and highway-building (something else blamed on planners rather than engineers) largely unchastened by the failures of the era to market themselves as the *competent* technocrats, unlike planners. Reflexive modernism in play.

The argument: Jane Jacobs was against central planning so planners must be wrong to plan.

The response: Okey dokey, Jacobs-follower, then stop planning. Go right ahead on. Don’t do it anymore. Swear it off, like donuts and cigarettes.

The argument: Have YOOOUUUUUU read the entire Jacobs corpus?

The response: Yes, yes, I have. And I still challenge you to go ahead and start your urban libertarian utopia. Go get ’em, Tiger. Far be it from me to hold anybody back from bold social experiments. But in the end when all that goes ‘phut’ you might find Hobbes was right and Jacobs guilty of exactly the blame projection that I described above. (I think Jacobs wrote very fine books and made really important contributions. I think she was right about a bunch of stuff. I also think she was wrong about a bunch of stuff, too, that people seldom talk about because they are too busy cherrypicking what they like. That’s fine as far as it goes, but plaster saints bore me.)

If Robert Moses was a planner by the standards of “functioning,” Jane Jacobs was, too. She made big normative claims about how cities should be. Planners do that *all the time.* And people like me argue that those normative claims are central to the profession and to the practice (two separate things).

Does it ultimately matter if Moses was a planner? Or Jacobs? I do not know. Labels really are not important, except to the degree that they come with a set of assumptions, and it’s those assumptions that make me squiggly.

That said, if you get a Robert Moses question on Jeopardy! you should say “urban planner” just to be safe.

I think the real lesson of the Power Broker isn’t about central planning, which has its own internal problems and contradictions the way everything in grown-up life has. The central of the power broker concerns institutions and the power of the state, which anybody associated with the state would do well to approach with fear and trembling if they want to be an ethical practitioner in the public professions.

Why, exactly, is Robert Moses urban planning’s fault and not public management’s fault?

Lisa Schweitzer

I’ve been reading through the Paris Review’s Interview with Robert Caro, as you should, too. I am a great fan of Robert Caro, but I do have to admit I am confused as to why Robert Moses is conflated with urban planning (and everything that was/is wrong with it) when he was never trained as a planner.

In this interview, Caro rather gratuitously decides he knew better than his professors about where highways get built–it’s self-aggrandizing story, in some respects, and granted who was probably teaching at Harvard at the time, I’d like to point out that, once again, instead of studying with urban planners, he was probably studying with civil engineers who were showing mathematical arguments for where highways *should* go–not where they do go. But anyway, my question remains: Caro never, not once, as far as I can tell, took a degree in urban planning. His background is in political science, in which he obtained a PhD from Yale. So he studied political power and went out and got it, and not surprisingly, he figured out one of the easiest places to wield a great deal of individual influence is in local politics and in institutions with copious bureaucratic discretion.

If anything, he was a public management guy, not a planner.

But somehow, nonetheless, the things he did became a lesson to one and all about how urban planning shouldn’t be done. Ok, but he didn’t learn that stuff in planning school.

The whole narrative strikes me more as a lesson power and rationality: If something goes wrong, then the planners did it. If something goes right, the engineers/city managers/real estate developmers/economists/architects/community did it right, despite all them dadgum planners.

Well screw that. Robert Moses wasn’t ours and it’s time another intellectual tradition took responsibility for him.

JAPA session at #APA16 had a nice turn-out with tough questions asked…

Lisa Schweitzer

Ok, in full disclosure: everybody else on the panel was super: Rob Olshansky, Michael Holleran, Karl Kim, Jennifer Minner, and Sandi Rosenbloom were all awesome. I generally sucked and rambled about the special issue I have coming out (our target in Spring 2017), but one of my authors, Bonnie Johnson, did a stellar job of discussing her paper on city managers and urban planners.

We got some push-back from the audience, however, about how none of them can access the Journal of the American Planning Association unless they cough up another $50, and they are right. When I used to belong to JAPA regularly–years ago, I admit–the Journal and Planning magazine were available to members, or at least it was a significant discount. Multiple members of the audience said they would like to have the information in JAPA, but subscriptions were too high for them given that they weren’t interested in whole issues. Oh, wait, the fee for members, I just looked, is an addition $38 if you want digital, and $48 if you want print.

One gentleman made the point that I, and a zillion other academics, review for free, I provide content for free…it’s “part of my job” for sure, but Taylor & Francis and Elsevier do not pay me…USC pays me. And then USC has to pay for the journal I provide content for.

This is all by way of saying that people, particularly APA members, should be able to buy single articles for a nominal fee, like $5. Why not? What does it cost publisher, really, to do that once the material has been prepared?

I am not sure. I am largely ignorant of the business of academic publishing, but $30 per article seems pretty high to me, granted the APA is the organization that contracts for the journal in the first place.

‘Splaining versus deliberation

Lisa Schweitzer

I’ve been taking a little break from Aristotle this week to read more in the post-democracy theories in political science, and this literature is making me miss Aristotle. Not because it’s bad theory, by any means; it’s a very good set of ideas, quite useful for trying to understand planning, but, man, is it depressing. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it’s had that effect on me.

It’s particularly interesting during this presidential election season and the difficulties of mass deliberation via the Internet, where pundit after pundit has made broad statements about who should appeal to whom. These difficulties are too numerous to count, but one has simply been the tendency to confuse “splaining” with deliberation. The former is a cute term that has emerged from the resistance to power and privilege grabbing the role of “knower” and explaining to the lesser, marginal person what’s what because, of course, knowers know and dumb wommins and peoples with different skin tones and young peoples and old peoples just don’t know, not at all. Whether it’s liberals deciding that people who support Trump are idiots, Bernie Bros talking down to blacks about why they should like Bernie more than Hillary, or George Will condescending to Millennials who support Sanders because they “don’t remember the Soviet Union” as he conflates democratic socialism with Soviet-style communism…it’s all the same behavior, and it reflects a fundamental lack of humility on the part of the writer/speaker and a disrespect toward voters.

Deliberation, by contrast, involves exploration and reaching out to understand what other people know, what they understand, and how they view the candidates. Deliberation means taking responsibility for what you think candidates’ ideas represent and the consequences of those ideas for different policies and groups. I don’t think Donald Trump will work for working people, but others think he will. Why do they think that? I have no idea, but I would like to.

For the record, I do have major problems with the incivility Trump has brought into the campaign, and I can be very hard on civility as virtue in other contexts. The refrain we see quoted over and over about how Trump “Tells it like it is” strikes me as a juvenile and self-indulgent rationalization for “Trump hates all the people I do and I like that he has the power to insult them.” There is no political or social value to the slurs he has slung at women and people of color–none whatsoever. Liberty does not mean license, and nobody’s free speech is really impinged when a person is asked to be responsible, or kind, with what they say and how they say it. People running around the world whining about political correctness have done jack diddly to evidence that anybody has really suffered in any material way, let alone being jailed in the manner of real repression, from being asked to say “chair” instead of “chairman.”

Leaders should set a better tone than he has, no matter what you think about the policy implications of the ideas or the man himself. I loathed Ronald Reagen’s policies, but I admired what I saw of the man in his interpersonal conduct. I disliked many of Bill Clinton’s policies and disliked what I knew of him intensely. I didn’t like the way he seemed to treat people around him, at all.

I myself have wondered a great deal about Trump’s appeal, and I’ve not seen a single, convincing explanation from anybody–not from political science or popular press of “this is what his supporters are thinking.” The wonderful thing about perceived political outsiders, like Trump, is that you can make them into anything you want to in your mind. So the refrain of “he’ll do things differently” and “he won’t be beholden to elites” is fine, but we have no real idea what he will do as president because he doesn’t have a governing record to extrapolate from. We might try to import his managerial style from his business life into what we might envision him to be as a governing executive, but there are many instances of people who are successful leaders and managers in one context who do not flourish in other contexts.

One idea I have circled around has to do with all this reading in post-democracy. Celebrities tend to do very well in elections (not governance, but elections), whether it is Schwarzenegger, Reagen, Sonny Bono, Fred Grandy, Ben Jones, Jesse Ventura, or, now, Donald Trump. I am not clear why, but it may have to do with the ready-made platform of celebrity; I know less than I would like to about the phenomenon of celebrity politics. In a post-democratic America, in a Baudrilliardian sense of the word, people perhaps believe that elites govern, and that’s that, and whoever they elect to the “big chair” will be dropped into that mire–and thus, they perceive that it doesn’t matter who gets elected. At least with celebrities, that person is entertaining.

Call for Abstracts: Planning Ethics

Lisa Schweitzer

from Lisa Schweitzer, University of Southern California and Associate Editor, JAPA

I am working on a proposal for a JAPA special issue on Planning Ethics, and we are shooting for a publication date in 2016. The more interest I can demonstrate, the more likely it will be approved. We could use ACSP to develop and work on some of our papers this year. I am also going to send a call out to APA, as practitioners have developed interesting ethics cases just about every year.

If you have a manuscript on ethics you’d like to try to get into the special issue, would you mind emailing it to me and letting me know if you would like to be part of a panel at ACSP? I think we might be to put together a nice group of papers for the planning theory track.

Please email me your abstracts by March 2 (to lschweit@usc.edu) and let me know if you want to be included in a panel. Even if you don’t want to be on a panel, feel free to send an abstract to get it on my radar. If we get the go-ahead from JAPA, I’ll send out a formal call for abstracts later this year with a timeline for paper submission.

Practitioners, students, and new scholars are particularly welcome to submit.

Some example themes may help illustrate what I’m looking for. Potential manuscripts:

—Develop the models, frameworks, and theoretical perspectives under which professionals can assess ethical problems in planning,

—Evaluate emerging ethical trends and controversies in planning, such as ethical uses of media to market projects and ideas and becoming an ally to those fighting social exclusion;

—Identify the scope and power of professional roles within private, nonprofit, and public institutions;

—Track the interdependence between political, social, economic, and technological variables in planning ethics; and

—Analyze or reconsider a significant case that helps scholars and practitioners think differently about ethics in the profession.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #2: Daphne Spain

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

Daphne Spain is the James M. Page Professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, so it’s fair to say that, as this week’s entry into #ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014, Dr. Spain has a big audience already. She is, in general, an urban historian of considerable renown. How Women Saved the City, from 2001, is a major work that highlights how women have contributed to urban development and politics from just after the onset of industrialization to the Progressive Era. It’s been awhile since I read that book (egads, it’s been close to 12 years), but I remember when I finished it, I said: I want to write a book this good someday.

I haven’t but, well, I’m trying.

She has contributed research on segregation, gentrification, and many other urban topics, and she’s a fine writer. But just about every major scholar has a piece of work that really didn’t get the attention it deserves, and for Dr. Spain, she’s got a sleeper of an article named:

Spain, D. “What Happened to Gender Relations on the Way from Chicago to Los Angeles?” City and Community 1 (June 2002):155-167.

It isn’t cited nearly as much as it should be, and the reason is perhaps that all these attempts to name different urban theory into place-based schools has gone out of fashion a bit, which is unfortunate, because it was all jolly fun with the Chicago School social ecology folks and some of the best minds in Los Angeles squaring off. City & Community published Michael Dear’s original essay , which contrasted the concentric, center-oriented model of the city, where, as Dear put it, the center arranges the hinterlands, with the postmodernists in LA who noted that in the polycentric modes of urban development in regions like Los Angeles, the periphery organized the center.

This is a delightful essay which generated a number of wonderful responses from the thinkers like Harvey Molotch (whose response is a like, boom!). The fact that Spain stepped straight into the “my-school-rules-ur-school-drools” academic boys town of urban theory here makes me smile, and her contribution to the discussion deserves to be read. The Chicago School helped us understand the walking city of early industrial American cities; the Los Angeles School epitomized the post-WWII metropolis of cars and urbanizing jobs. Spain notes that the idealized version of white womanhood within the domestic sphere isolated many women; while the constrained status of immigrant and African American women isolated them within the larger workforces. The stand-outs among higher status women in the settlement house movement, Spain notes, get pretty short shrift from Park and Burgess, an influence that they were wrong to overlook. Immigrant women working from Hull House demanded (successfully) better urban services for impoverished communities, organized ethnic festivals, and helped immigrants find housing and educational opportunities. That’s the real work of city making, and it’s not less real just because it falls beneath notice.

As urban models changed, Steven Flusty, Michael Dear, Ed Soja, Manuel Castells, and David Harvey developed their own models and metaphors for urbanism while still overlooking the influence on the city that women had during those decades. In particular, the Los Angeles school ignored the work undertaken by women in Los Angeles, such as Dolores Hayden’s work with HOMES–Homemakers Organization for a More Egalitarian Society–reorganizing single-family spaces in to much more flexible, shared housing and mixed uses. And she also highlights the work of Jacqueline Leavitt at UCLA in examining how women in public housing in LA–some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the US–altered their home places to protect their families.

Daphne’s major contribution notes that Chicago and Los Angeles have more in common than just urban theorists who fail to notice that women affect the city and that women also produce urban scholarship. The cities, though at different time periods, were major destinations for immigrants and for African American migration. They were the locales of violent social protests from African Americans furious at poor treatment of urban institutions, and that those popular protests have become ingrained in the popular imaginary about race and violence. One key difference, however, concerns the status of women at the different times, and that difference is important.

Two key differences led to changing the domestic sphere and dispersing its responsibilities across wider parts of metro regions: widely available birth control and entering the workforce. Here is missed opportunity in the manuscript. Spain notes the effect that domestic labor changes had on households, but as higher status, white and middle-class women left home to find work–changing the geographic logic of where residential households should locate–they also changed the geography for household service work that supported white women’s entry into the workforce, pulling and dispersing their jobs in ways that were likely farther from their own homes and families. Spain doesn’t bring this up, and I wish she would because I think she’d have some insights. As it is, sociologists like Pierrette Hongagnue-Soleto have filled in where Spain didn’t.

In any case, Spain reconstructs some possibilities for urban theory in the last part of her manuscript. First, safety and security–from Mike Davis’s “fortress” metaphor onward–are not gender-neutral ideas in the city. And second, caregiving and family life, though changing, still calls on women’s time and work more heavily than for their male counterparts. Understanding that gender factors in strongly in both the shaping and navigation of urban form leads to better theory.

My planning ethics syllabus

Lisa Schweitzer

PPD 599
Professional Planning Ethics
Instructor: Lisa Schweitzer
Email: lschweit@usc.edu
Office hours: 1- 3 Tuesday or by appointment

Planning is a normative profession, and its practitioners seek to explore, define, and implement change in urban settings based, at least in part, on values and preferences. But to affect change in the city, you have to have some idea what is good change, what is not, what kind of conduct towards achieving those outcomes is acceptable. The assessments of what is good or bad in cities, as you can imagine, is political at every level that planners encounter.

Being a professional in that political context presents individuals with some tough choices about their own conduct as they work within and outside planning institutions. What types of moral discretion do planners have in practice, and what type should they have, if they work with a public agency? A nonprofit? What is the difference between professional discretion and cutting corners? What is the line between effective advocacy—the noble argument for desired ends—and straight-up lying for self-interested gain? These questions appear everywhere in planning and public life. Along with this responsibility go the questions: when you have reached your limit, when should you blow the whistle, exit the organization quietly, or go along with your peers and the institution on the chance they are right and you are wrong?

Feminist scholars often criticize standard ethical approaches for putting job-related concerns over family and other important relationships. If a person is the only source of income for a dependent family, flouncing out of a job simply because you do not agree with an agency’s action may not be any more ethical than tolerating it, when viewed through this ethical lens.

This class will focus on professional ethics in planning. Our major goals for the class are to

1. Understand the models, frameworks, and theoretical perspectives under which professionals can assess ethical problems in planning;
2. Evaluate the most important emerging ethical trends and controversies in planning, such as ethical uses of the conventional and new media to market projects and ideas;

3. Identify the scope and power of professional roles within various institutions;

4. Track the interdependence between political, social, economic, and technological variables in planning ethics; and

5. Gain skills in reasoning through, resolving, and explaining ethical problems both verbally and in writing.

Class 1: January 16: What is moral reasoning in professional life?
This week’s concepts: normative ethics, metaethics, duty ethics, egoism, virtue ethics, deontology, social contract theory, teleology, consequentialism, obligations, virtues, natural law and divine command, relativism, intuition, emotivism, hedonism, narrative and situational ethics.

Readings:
Frankena, W. 1988. Ethics. Second Edition. “Introduction” New York: Pearson.
(Available via BBoard.) pp. 1-17. (On BBoard)

Thacher, David. 2004. “The Casuistical Turn in Planning Ethics”, The Journal of Planning Education and Research. (On BBoard)

American Institute of Planners Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
http://www.planning.org/ethics/
(Keep this website bookmarked: we’ll go back to it again and again.)

Class 2: January 23: Role Ethics I
What are roles? Why are they so important? What are the duties and protections that a professional role conveys?

Readings:
Sanson, Charles-Henri. “The Executioner of Paris.” (On BBoard)

Quinlan, M. “Ethics in the Public Service,” Governance 6, No. 4 (October 1993): 538-544. (BBoard.)

Arthur Applbaum,“Professional Detachment: The Executioner of Paris,” 15-42;
in Ethics for Adversaries. (On BBoard)

“Ex-Virginia Executioner opposes the death penalty.” In the Washington Post (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-10/local/37026104_1_death-penalty-death-sentences-linwood-briley)

Case 1: The Expo Line and the art of the deal
Expo Line Exec Rick Thorpe has been, throughout his career, a bit of darling in transit circles, branding himself as the go-to guy for managing transit projects and commanding a very high salary as he does so. His strategies for the Expo Line have drawn public criticism for conflict of interests among his various hats and roles. You are a consultant to AICP and APTA, and your job is to see whether the material uncovered in the LA Weekly story comprises something that requires further investigation—or simple management mistakes that could happen to anybody heading up such a large project.

LA Weekly:
(http://www.laweekly.com/2010-12-02/news/l-a-s-light-rail-fiasco/)

My fast-and-dirty starting point: (http://lisaschweitzer.com/?s=Rick+Thorpe)

Movies, Media (optional): The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Isuguro’s novel is a truly amazing book. The movie is also well worth watching.

Class 3: January 30: Role Ethics II
Democratic facilitation versus winning? What is the planner’s role in public conflicts over space?

Readings:
Arthur Applbaum,
“The Remains of the Role,” in Ethics for Adversaries, 61-75.
“Professional Detachment: The Executioner of Paris,” 15-42; “Montaigne’s Mistake,” 240-259
in Ethics for Adversaries. (On BBoard)

Quinlan, “Response” [To Applbaum]: Governance 6, No. 4 (October 1993): 558. (On BBoard)

Case 2: A Town for White Supremacy? In general, people associate suburbs with white supremacy, but the cosmopolitan nature of many of our major cities suggests that suburban demographics are changing. But beyond that, Craig Cobb, an entrepreneur, recently proposed in Leith, North Dakota a town specifically designed to serve the consumer preference for whiteness. Should planners enable this proposal through the approvals process, or fight it? Pick a position and defend it.

A place to start:

Trying to make a town the capital of white supremacy (http://newsone.com/2724583/bobby-harper-craig-cobb-leith-north-dakota/)

Sewer and water issues and state permitting: (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/25/poop-and-water-issues-may-shut-down-white-supremacist-north-dakota-town/)

Class 4: February 6: Role Ethics III: The Ethics of Identity and Difference Planners tend to come from fairly privileged backgrounds. In addition, they often represent democratic majorities, powerful state institutions, or developers. The profession itself is not as inclusive as it should be: many factors of white supremacy, patriarchy, and class interlock to push people out of the profession and out of engaging with the planning process. The topic of how to engage productively across difference is too large to handle in one week. Nonetheless, possession of social and economic privilege means that we have an obligation to be aware of it and to alter our conduct accordingly. This week gives us a place to start.

Code of ethics for antiracist allies by J.L. Calderon.
http://jlovecalderon.com/code-of-ethics-for-antiracist-white-allies/

Class 5: February 13: Discretion versus democratic representation
How can we simultaneously satisfy the public’s desire to have decisions made by qualified professionals and their desire that decisions be responsive to public demands? What should planners do when people have strong opinions founded on bad information or demonstrably sloppy reasoning?

Burke, Edmund. Speech at Bristol, in The Works of Edmund Burke (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), 218-222. (On BBoard)

Hannah Pitkin, “Representing Unattached Interests: Burke,” in Concept
of Representation, Chapter 8. (On BBoard)

Pitkin: “Representing People who Have Interests: Liberalism,” in Concept of
Representation, Chapter 9. (On BBoard)

Case 3: Campaigning—or planning—for Measure R?
In 2008 with Measure R, a local option sales tax measure, Valley area council member Mike Antonovich called out LA Metro for their choices with regard to “informational” documents sent in support of a ballot box measure.

You work for Metro, and based on this case, you have been asked to draft a policy regarding agency communications about ballot box initiatives like Measure R in the future. (Case materials on Blackboard).

Class 6: February 20: Ethics of Planning Rhetoric
Is planners’ use of political rhetoric praise-worthy for enabling democratic action, or is it a form of manipulation, or does it depend on circumstances? How do we draw the line between rhetoric and reasoning? How much information should planners be expected to reveal about their projects and services when they are in the middle of a political fight?

Plato, Gorgias (Hackett), 1-26, 447a-466a. (On BBoard)

Robert E. Goodin, “Rhetorical Trickery,” in Manipulatory Politics (Yale, 1980), 93-122. (On BBoard)

Galston, William. “The Obligation to Play Political Hardball,” in Claudia Mills (Ed.), Values and Public Policy* (On BBoard)

Case 4: The social marketing of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Eagles
In the late 1990s, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Authority staffers began to use a nesting pair of bald eagles as a means for education surrounding the Bridges’ ecology restoration programs. As time wore on, the educational component surrounding the eagles fell away, as the animals became symbols for the project. What did planners around the project gain and lose as the eagles became media celebrities? Was the social marketing ethical? You are a mentor to a young environmental planner at the WWB authority who has become concerned that the way the Authority is using the eagles in the media has misrepresented the project’s environmental impact. What do you advise the young planner to do and why?

February 26: Planners as Liars (Part 1)
Walzer, Michael. 1973. “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, No. 2 (1973): 160-180 (On BBoard)

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 15-22 (Ak. 399-405); Metaphysical Elements of Virtue (2 page excerpt on lying: 90-93, Ak. 429-432) and “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives,” 346-350.
(On BBoard)

Class 7: March 6: Planners as liars ( Part 2)
Last week we were pretty abstract. This week, we’re going to get our hands dirty with some cases.

Korsgaard, Christine M. “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15, No. 4 (Fall 1986): 325-349. (On BBoard)

Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981): Book III, Chap. VII, §2 (on Kant and lying); Book IV, Chap. 5, §3, 485-492 (on cases in which utilitarians should not make their principles public). (On BBoard)

Use Sidgwick’s cases to think about your reflections this week.

Wachs, M. 1996. “Ethics and Advocacy in Forecasting.” (http://www.honolulutraffic.com/Wachs_2.pdf)

Flyvbjerg, B. 2001. “When Planners Lie With Numbers.” (http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/liewithnumbers.php)

Case 5: California High Speed Rail Ballot Box Initiative
In 2008 as part of a ballot box initiative called Prop 1A meant to raise $10 billion for high speed rail, the California High Speed Rail Authority issued cost estimates for the entire, 520 km system at a little over $32 billion despite extensive criticism from infrastructure experts that the promised project was likely to cost nearly $80b to $120b. Throughout the election, rail advocates, encouraged by the CHSRA, shouted down such criticisms whenever possible. Then, two weeks after the ballot box measure passed, the CHSRA issued new cost estimates of $42 billion. Facing yet more criticism and the state’s comptroller who was unwilling to issue bonds with such incorrect estimates, the CHSRA issued a new business with cost estimates ranging from $75b to $100b. Outraged, Governor Jerry Brown demanded a re-envisioning of the estimates which came in at $72b with project modifications. Still, many feel that the original estimates come close to (if not amount to) ballot fraud and there should be a re-vote on the measure. Advocates of the project claim that voters already approved the project with the 2008 and that the cost estimates are irrelevant.

You have been appointed to chair the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Governance and Accountability. Your job is to review the case and conclude about whether the problems with forecasting and democratic accountability constitute unethical practice and whether the state should be required to go back to the voters to re-approve California’s High Speed Rail Project. Keep in mind, the Governor very much wants this project to go forward. But is it more likely to go forward if the house gets cleaned, or if you do damage control? Perhaps the project should die, after all, if it can’t clear the vote?

Class 8: March 13: Set aside for one of your topics!

March 20: Spring Break! Please enjoy, be ethical, and have a good time!

Class 9: The Ethics of Changes, Demolition, and Takings
One thing I wish every planner or developer would learn: blowing into a community and describing a place or a community as “ghetto”or “blighted” is both unprofessional and bad manners. Describing a person’s neighborhood in negative terms is a lot like walking into their home and calling it a dump. Even if there might be good reasons for championing change, like community members seeking change themselves, planners have a duty (or do they?) to demonstrate empathy towards the process of change.

Marris, P. 1986. Loss and Change. Routledge. (On BBoard)

Leigh, R. 23 (1996) Ethics of Compensation: Takings, Utility, and Justice, The Ecological Law Quarterly. (On BBoard)

Class 10: April 3: Whistleblowing
From Edward Snowden to Sherron Watkins, whistleblowers are both celebrated and reviled among their peers and the colleagues. What is the right way to stop your employer from doing wrong?

Jensen, J Vernon. “Ethical Tension Points in Whistleblowing.” J Bus Ethics 6, no. 4 (1987): doi:10.1007/BF00382941. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00382941 (On BBoard)

Milbank, D. “Putting her foot down and getting the boot.” Washington Post. July 10, 2008. (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-07-10/opinions/36888695_1_thurman-higginbotham-army-contractor-media-coverage)

Milbank, D. 2013. “The Price Gina Gray paid for whistleblowing.” Washington Post. (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-20/opinions/41427821_1_channels-edward-snowden-president-obama)

Ravishankar, Lilanthi. 2003. “Encouraging Internal Whistleblowing.” UC Santa Clara Working paper on Ethics, Center for Applied Ethics, UC Santa Clara. http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/whistleblowing.html

Case 6 The Housing Authority: You are a financial associate with the Los Angeles Housing Authority. You have been clearing the vouchers for Section 8 housing, when you are abruptly informed that, despite a waiting list of nearly 380 families, that there are no remaining funds for the program. You have been working with families for months, and there has been no indicator—not from your boss or from the people in accounting—that you would not be able to serve a least 200 of the remaining families. When you inquire, you are told that the vouchers cleared so far cost far more than you had projected. Confused, you backcheck your calculations and double-check the payments out for vouchers. You find that, in general, your original projections for the vouchers were very close—certainly not enough to make for the significant funding deficit. When you press your boss, you are told that they were mistaken when they blamed your original projections, but that the authority is entering a fiscal crisis. Again, this is the first you have heard for the fiscal crisis, and when you bring it up with analysts for other programs, they say they have heard nothing of it. When you suggest to your boss that perhaps all the analysts should meet to discuss the fiscal concerns, your boss tells you to ‘drop it’ and begin re-doing next year’s projections. When you approach your boss’s boss, you are told that your original projections for Section 8 spending must have been in error. What should you do?

Class 11: April 10: Planners, harms, and wrongs
Despite the best efforts planners make, planning and development can and do hurt communities. Often, individual planners join agencies that have committed harms and wrongs long before the planner joined. Even if planners are directly involved, democratic decisions, undertaken by public institutions, may reflect the priorities of democratic majorities, and those priorities may not include deferring to the preferences of democratic minorities. Or democratic decisions may be taken by a diffuse group of actors so that assigning blame to planners makes little sense. And yet, communities and individuals experience harms and wrongs nonetheless, and it influences how planners can ethically relate to them. You can’t just act like nothing happened, or that what happened doesn’t matter.

Sklar, J. 1990. “Misfortune and Injustice.” Faces of Injustice. Harvard University Press. (On BBoard)

Schweitzer, L. Forthcoming. ”Restorative Planning Ethics.” Planning Theory.’’ (On BBoard)

Case 7: The Blue Line and Broken Promises
In 1992 in riot-torn South Los Angeles, the LA metro promised a train line that would bring jobs and new opportunities to the area. The train has delivered a lot of mobility but very little in the way of promised growth to South LA. Do those promises reflect simple misfortune in planners and project advocates misjudging the future? Or injustice in making promises planners were in no position to keep to be begin with (reflecting back on rhetoric and Gorgia and ‘winning’? What, if anything, should planners do about the Blue Line, or in future relations with residents of south central?

You work for Legal Defense Fund in Los Angeles, and your job is to recommend a position for LDF to adopt with regard to future rail development in South Central.

(Case materials found on Blackboard)

Class 12: April 17: Whom Do Planners Serve?
We have spent the semester talking about the ‘public’ service and the ‘public’ interest, and we’ve danced around this idea about who planners serve throughout the semester. Local residents? What if their preferences conflict with those of long-term sustainability? Future generations? What about people in need now?

Seyla Benhabib. 2007. “Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times.”
Citizenship Studies. 11(1): 19-36 (On BBoard)

Douglas Kellner and Richard Kahn. 2008. “Resisting Globalization.” in
The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, Ch. 34 (On BBoard)

Do We Owe a Duty to Future Generations to Preserve the Global Environment?
A d’Amato – The American Journal of International Law, 1990 (On BBoard)

Rolston III, Holmes. 1996. Feeding People Versus Saving Nature. IN William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, eds., World Hunger and Morality, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), pages 248–267
http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/RolstonPeopleVSNature.html (On BBoard)

Class 13: April 24: Wrapping up
Reading:
American Institute of Planners Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
http://www.planning.org/ethics/
(Keep this website bookmarked: we’ll go back to it again and again.)

Case 8: Rewrite the AICP Code of Ethics for 2014. (knowing what you know now)

(last week of class due to MPL comp)

Do What You Love in work and Utopianism in planning

Lisa Schweitzer

Miya Tokumitsu has an essay up over at Slate, which seems to have been adapted from Jacobin, about how people need to shut it about “Doing what you love” because that devalues the real nature of very difficult, largely manual, labor. My students have been discussing this idea on Fboo, and rightly noting that this author has hit upon a very important point about the connection between affluence, choice, and privilege in occupations. I dissented on a couple points.

First of all, it is undoubtedly true that do what you love is facile advice, particularly if you don’t think for yourself, and thinking for yourself is undervalued. My problem is a supposition that the writer makes, which I do not think is at all true, that the DWYL advice somehow translates to devaluing “real work.” I am very nervous about the idea that something as fluffy as DWYL devalues work that was paid scarcely minimum wage, or unpaid entirely when we are taking about caregiving work, long before Steve Jobs said ANYTHING about doing what you love. That is, please learn to recognize the difference between a cause and a symptom: the poor treatment of laborers, particularly in low status professions, happened long, long before we had creative class hipster types chatting on about fulfilling work and the people who hate them because they annoy.

Moreover, I think I have a unique perspective on the value of the “DWYL” advice because I was raised in an environment where people *never* said that. I wasn’t raised to enjoy work. I was raised to shut up and obey authority. I was raised to expect work to be a miserable grind. You weren’t supposed to be happy at work. You worked long, miserable hours only to have to come home to say to your kids “No, you can’t have that because we can’t afford that” and watch as teachers and other kids treat your kid like crap because you’ve outfitted them in mismatched stained clothing from Goodwill. This was the life my mother told me to expect for myself. The big, shining dream she had? I could maybe go to college and at best be an elementary school teacher. That was it. That was her entire dream for my life; it was the shiniest shiney thing she could imagine. So what if I hated kids and was terribly unsocial and could barely speak? I would have to deal with that misery because being a low-paid elementary school teacher was the most lavish life she could envision. Because those folks had health care and could buy their kids new shoes when they needed them. While town kids (like my cousins) had after school activities, poor farm kids like me were doing shitty, often soul-destroying work some of us hated (and some of us loved) on farms that were going bankrupt slowly in the 1980s.

Now, there is a great deal right with being an elementary school teacher if it is, like it is for my friend Jeff, what you want to do. It is not what I was born to do. I hated elementary school children even when I, myself, was in elementary school. My inside died every single time my mother prattled on about how awesome it would be to be a teacher. My family *deplored and attacked* any and all dreams I had that weren’t elementary school teaching. I wanted to be a writer. OMG. It was my mother’s mission in life to attack that dream. Shame on me for wanting to write. Being a writer meant I would expect her to pay my way my entire life, sit around like a lazy worthless slob, and that was not going to happen, nosireebob. “Writing is a lazy man’s profession” my mother would say, shooting me daggers. And I learned. I learned never to mention that dream around them.

Because you can not kill desire, I achieved that dream anyway, in a manner that allowed me to both pay my own rent and that allowed me to read and write for a living and NOT spend my time wiping noses and asses in an elementary school. I made my life slipping between and among the constraints that my beginning in life set up for me (ok, probably not going to rule a country, though I think I’d be good at that and I’d probably enjoy it; also nix on the NBA star/ballerina dream). But there were other things I did love and could find a way to pay my rent. I would have been a marvelous classicist, but the job market there was scary, and so I picked something else that also allowed me to optimize on my strengths and what was out there in the world as a feasible option the things allow me to do the things I love to do (write, read. Talk about things I’m writing and reading. etc).

By not accepting what was “realistic” for me, I exceeded my predicted lifetime income, not just by a little. A lot. And I love going to work. Yes, there are richer people than me monetarily, but I do not want what I haven’t got.

You will find, I think, that there is, indeed, a great deal of honor among people who do jobs that they hate, but they often do those jobs they hate because of love. They do them to survive and to try to give their kids or their siblings or a chance at something better. That’s still doing what you love; it’s just not related to the job. It’s service and sacrifice for what you love. Encouraging people to find what they love hardly devalues the honor and sacrifice of people who do work they don’t love for people they do love.

And there are also people who love to work with their hands and come home every day smelling like sweat and manure and who enjoy what they do, too.

I am not satisfied the idea that *only* creative types or Steve Jobs types or privileged people can have a worthy vocation. Figuring out what matters to you–what you love, iow, strikes me as the most important thing anybody of any socio-economic class can do over the course of the life they are dealt. Perhaps the nature of the work matters to you less than the people you work with; perhaps context matters more than the job. Perhaps the fact you can work from 6 until 3 so that you can be there when your kids are out of school defines what what you love. Doing what you love falls under all those choices, and I do not think that class privilege robs you of any and all of those choices. Lack of privilege may constrain those choices by a lot more than you want them constrained, but it shouldn’t rob you from thinking about what would make you happier.

Just like utopian plans are often silly and unworkable, they can sometimes help to shine the light on the things that we really want. I refuse to problematize desire even though desires are not uniformly realized.