Engage the Terrain
In my final semester of a dual graduate degree, I am engaged in two planning activities which are not quite real projects, but also not completely thought-exercises. They are also not quite professional practice, nor completely academic. These categories matter more than you might imagine. There have been many interesting observations about how these categories intersect, and the problems or strengths therein. But what I have been most recently both fascinated and frustrated by is the increasing gap and separation between technological and high-touch approaches.
I have a number of biases: for one, unlike the overwhelming majority of my classmates, I have 31 years of professional work experience – 40, if we are counting by man-hours and not chronological years, and that’s only because I substituted pursuing three graduate degrees, two undergraduate degrees and a handful of professional credentials in my “off time” normally filled by a second work role of some sort. Somewhere around 25 of those years have been in community planning, from infrastructure to community development – planning is a big tent, and I’ve spent some time in every niche. I am not only older than 99% of fellow students, I am an age-peer of many professors. I am also formally trained in the discrete practice of project management: I am not, as they say, an “accidental project manager.” I am, then, an atypical practitioner with substantial formal education and decades of real-world experience with collateral training.
Two, my background is in Cultural Anthropology, and no matter what setting I’m in, or what type of project I am working on, doing “it” through the approach of ethnography is my bent. And, I would argue, the reason I have been so successful at accurately assessing situations quickly: I am gathering actuals on the ground, rather than ideals from up top. If you ever want to know how you’re really doing with your corporate culture, ask an anthropologist.
Following this background, my first coursework was in macro social work, focusing on community systems and organizing. It has been exciting to understand field experiences in the past and present through new language and descriptive paradigms, but ultimately, this was territory I knew well; it felt familiar, cozy. Contrary to what some younger students initially believe, social justice is not a new thing: newly having the idea yourself does not make the idea, itself, new. But this curriculum is relevant because the methods promoted are, like anthropology, high-touch. Being on the ground is paramount. Knowing the players, not by name, but by real-life contact. Taking a moment to look at someone’s background so that you have some anticipation of what informs his/her point of view, priorities, knowledge bases. Understanding that the map is not the terrain, and that the terrain is social, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical. What is most important to understand is that “participatory” is not a module added-on to an otherwise insular process in order to check a box. It’s an entire Weltanschauung. It is both the process and, in critical ways, the product.
Enter the urban planning curriculum. In this space, we explore public housing by taking a visibly marked university bus on a field trip, riding through the projects with our noses against the windows like we’re on a poverty safari. We do enormous data dumps without having collected, yet, one single criterion from the community about the goals, the vision, the lived experience of being in the space we’re supposedly revitalizing, redesigning, reforming. Like in social work, students come from all kinds of backgrounds, but there is more representation from technical fields, and so concepts like enthnography are not shared methodological assumptions, but completely foreign concepts. Quantitative data is often referred to as “real data,” in comparison to qualitative data; many are not even sure what to ask or what the goals are in qualitative assessments. Even with the “inclusion and diversity” faculty, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what this means in application. This is a structural problem within the field. It is a field which talks about different knowledges, but in action, clearly privileges itself as Expert. In a broad generalization, the field does not, cannot, perceive its cognitive dissonance. It is a field where, now, problems are viewed as technical problems with technical solutions as primary, best, efficient. It was not always this way: urban planning began more as macro social work. But it now has a technological frame, exacerbated and amplified increasingly by the richness of our technological opt-ins and opt-outs. In fact, it was even celebrated as an official STEM discipline, recently. Oh, thank God, we’ve arrived at legitimacy.
Treating everything like a technical problem is how you come to ideas promoted not long ago like replacing urban neighborhood bodegas with elaborate vending machines. This is not a disruptive innovation to solve a technical delivery problem: it’s a disruption of social networks. It’s a fundamental lack of understanding about the social function of corner stores. Jane Jacobs aside, there is no one who has lived in a true city neighborhood who does not understand that the corner store is a 3rd space through which you build connections with neighbors by running into them when you’re both buying Slim Jims. It’s a place where you might leave a key to be picked up by a friend, a sort of informal sentry who’s keeping rough tally on who’s being naughty and nice. It’s a place where you may be able to get just a bit of credit for some essentials until Friday, if you’re a regular. If social networks are mycelia, bodegas are the mushrooms, collecting information above ground to inform the whole system. When someone announces that a social system is inefficient, what s/he is truly announcing is that s/he does not really understand what functions are being performed.
This is also how you come to an entire swath of practitioners who resist things like ground inventories, or who insist that being in the spatial reality should be done in highly insular groups instead of as vulnerable individuals. It’s so inefficient, this on-the-ground bit, when Google has made the whole world transparent to us from both bird’s eye and street level. Setting aside that data is not static, and conditions observed from a year ago are not conditions of today, it is more important to understand that being in situ gives you not just an answer to the direct question, whatever that is. It provides a wealth of context and information that allows you to understand the answer – perhaps even the original question. Technologists say, ‘I can know everything about census demographics from a data table: why should I care about the self-perceptions of identity or tribalism on the ground? That’s interesting, but it’s not real data.’ The rise of technology and the ability to transit from A to M without being bothered by all the building blocks inbetween has led some of us to regard the letters inbetween as noise, rather than signal. In social systems, context is not only relevant data, it’s essential data. I like to joke that this new perception of how to get things done is the difference between masturbation and great sex: masturbation is very efficient, but great sex is incomparably better and made great precisely because of all the signal that comes through inefficient meandering. Data cannot relay the experience of place. It’s a wild kind of arrogance to believe that you can improve an experience you haven’t had.
I am hesitant to quickly categorize the gap as generational. Yes, I am amused by some youth who assume that prioritizing the social in social systems is cover for being a Luddite. My new counter-quip is that the Boomers invented the internet, but my generation built it for your generation to play on. This is not cleanly true, but suffice it to say that after childhood summers in geeky Wang computer camps and learning Fortran and C in high school, my entire adulthood has integrated technological tools: from back when using technology meant having to lift the hood up to lay down some code just to get my program to launch or print, Snapchat darlings. Knowing a thing’s limits comes from deep familiarity, not vice versa. But while leading a technology-infused existence likely does contribute to an essential lack of regard for complex socialization, it is not wholly sufficient as an answer. Even before the internet was a layman thing, transportation engineers and feudal land-use lords like Moses (NYC, not Egypt) were tearing up the social environment, permanently disrupting a relational ecology which had taken generations to build. In some cases, this kind of destruction can lead to better outcomes, if that is the intention: displacement can overcome, conceptually, spatially ingrained segregation, for example. But it can also just move the whole dysfunctional set-up to another place, with all of the negatives and none of the positives. Mindfulness and discernment are imperative to understand what is, what needs to be done, and how you may best do it. And that insight ain’t on Google, in traffic volume calculations, or with transactional anonymity.