Nourishing the Seed of Civic Individualism

A couple of posts back, I mentioned that I was in the final stages of an annual trip with a pair of good friends.  Each year, we pick a different part of the country in which to spend a week moseying about, enjoying the minor league baseball and cuisine of the region.  This year, we visited New Mexico.

Being a moderately observant traveler who views the world through urbanist spectacles, I see stuff to share with my readers.  Today will be the first of several posts in which New Mexico and the tip of west Texas offer urbanist insights.

Scheduling a trip around the vagaries of minor league baseball schedules is an annual challenge, one that I’ve described as an adult jigsaw puzzle for travelers.  This year, the schedules demanded that we begin and end our trip in El Paso, a few miles south of the New Mexico border.  But that was great because El Paso has a fine new ballpark, well-located in the urban grid and with grand views of the scenic beauty of El Paso.

Given our daily routine of travel, noshing, and evening baseball, we often found ourselves looking for a final snack after a ballgame.  On this trip, we twice cruised the streets of El Paso after ballgames, looking for late evening nourishment.

In the course of those searches, we found that El Paso has a surprising level of late evening activity.  And I don’t mean drinking and carousing, but families out and about, enjoying the relative cool of the evening hours.

Some may hypothesize that the Hispanic segment of the population, building on a tradition of evening promenades, is responsible for the evening socializing.  But my observation was that the people on the streets as the midnight hour approached generally matched the demographic mix of El Paso.  From my few data points, I’d argue that the primary cause of the eventide activity is the desire to get outside after a day of remaining indoors to avoid the heat.

Whatever the cause, one evening we ate pancakes at an 24-hour IHOP which had a nearly full parking lot when we arrived at 11:00pm and in which a large meeting, perhaps a Bible study group, was still going strong when we departed near midnight.

Another evening, we had appetizers at a Village Inn which had a good crowd of families, including babies sleeping in carriers, despite the late hour.  As we left, the parking lot had amorous couples embracing in goodbyes, requiring the use of the back-up camera on our rental vehicle to ensure that we didn’t bump any of the oblivious lovers.  The restaurant was going to remain open until 3am.

Some may wonder if IHOP and Village Inn were really the preferred destinations of three middle-aged guys looking for evening refreshments.  And the answer is no.  One evening in particular, we went looking for a Chili’s only to find that it had closed at 11pm.

In a town with a surprising number of people out and about in the late evening hours looking for quiet refreshment, a restaurant well-suited to meet that need had inexplicably closed early.  The three of us scratched our heads and decided that a blanket corporate policy was the only possible explanation.

And that’s the point I want to make in this post.  Cities develop unique characteristics, whether the late night ramblings of El Paso, the fine dining of Napa, or the neighborhood meeting places of Petaluma.

And while we generally cherish those characteristics, with city halls often touting them as a reason for businesses to relocate to their communities, most cities simultaneously try to bury those characteristics under mounds of paper and plastic.

The paper is the zoning codes that, despite the best efforts of over-worked city staffs, often mimic the zoning codes of other communities, draining away local uniqueness.

And the plastic is the national chains that bring the same merchandise and menu selections to every town, overwhelming local character.

It’s not easy maintaining local character against those twin forces, but it is nonetheless a goal of urbanism, even if only to convince Chili’s to remain open until 2am to accommodate local social patterns.  Defining and maintaining local character is a topic to which I’ll return.

Before closing, I should return to a point on which some may be puzzling, which is why an urbanist is writing about national chains like IHOP, Village Inn, and Chili’s when I should be celebrating single-location establishments like Ray’s in Petaluma.  The answer is that late evenings in an unfamiliar big city is perhaps the one time when the safety of a national chain is a reasonable choice.

But at all other times during the trip, we aggressively sought out unique restaurants and pubs.  As a result, we had some marvelous meals.  I’ll summarize a few highlights in an upcoming post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Job Satisfaction Limited for City Planners

In late May I attended CNU 21, the 21st annual conference of the Congress of the New Urbanism.  During my time in Salt Lake City, I spoke several times with a senior planner who was recently hired by a mid-sized suburban city.  During one of our conversations, I congratulated him on the far-sightedness of his town in encouraging him to attend CNU 21.

He informed me that my assumption was wrong.  Urbanism is a passion for him and attending CNU 21 was a personal goal.  But he had been forced to negotiate his attendance at CNU 21 during his hiring.  He convinced the city to cover the registration fee and to allow him to attend on city time rather than using vacation for the week.  But he still had to pay for travel, lodging, and meals out of his own pocket.

And then he told me the rest of the story.  He holds a CNU- A, an accreditation which certifies that he’s familiar with the best current work in land-use planning.  When he applied for the position with the city, he included the CNU-A on his resume.

But that information gave pause to the city hiring team.  They questioned whether he would be neutral in handling his planning duties or whether his education would bias his work.  To gain employment, he had to promise not to be an urbanist, or at least not an obvious one. 

His story, plus a CNU 21 session on the same subject, highlighted a point about which I hadn’t previously thought.  Many municipal planners have focused on their career paths for years, some even starting during their high school years.  (My planner acquaintance discovered that he lacked the aptitude for his first choice during high school, so changed his direction to urban design and secured a four-year degree in the subject at a top university.)

Through that emphasis, future planners become familiar with the best theories on how land use should be done in the 21st century.  And those theories are urbanism.

(Side note: Some cynics will now interject “Ah-hah, urbanism is only a current theory.  Other theories, such as drivable suburban, may be equally valid, but are disdained because they are currently out of favor.”  Regular readers know my response, but I’ll summarize for newcomers.

Urbanism is how people arranged their communities from the beginning of civilization until early in the 20th century.  And then some countries, particularly the U.S., began to follow a hypothesis that included “garden suburbs”, “towers in the park”, and motorized personal mobility.  The experiment based on that hypothesis ripened into what we now call “drivable suburban”.

We set aside organic knowledge that was gained over centuries in favor of a hypothesis that was based on beliefs about how people should behave, not how they actually did behave.

As Jeff Speck points out, the failure of the drivable suburban experiment was highlighted by Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s.  By 1980, all serious students of planning agreed with her.  And that consensus remains in place today.  Nonetheless, drivable suburban continues as the dominant planning mode because the general public hasn’t yet grasped that the experiment flopped.

Urbanism isn’t one of several alternative theories.  It is the only theory that has ever been shown to work.  Using scientific nomenclature, drivable suburban was a hypothesis that failed the experimental step and therefore didn’t become a theory.

Urbanism is the theory that people have followed throughout history, except for the 20th century.  That truth may be difficult to grasp because we are surrounded by the detritus of the failed drivable suburban experiment, but that doesn’t make it any less true.)

So, new planners emerge from their long study of the centuries of community-building.  They’re flush with their acquired knowledge about planning and eager to apply their knowledge to the betterment of the human race.  It’s a noble goal.

Except that for those who end up in municipal planning departments, the goal is stymied almost before they reach their desk.  Their job isn’t to help lead the citizenry to the best planning solutions.  Their job is to facilitate and to document planning decisions that are often made by those with less planning knowledge.

Whether it’s in the writing of general plans and zoning codes, for which citizen committees and city councils usually take the lead, or in the review of land-use applications, which are structured by developers and lenders trying to meet the perceived needs of the general public, city planners often have the most knowledge about the land uses that would best serve the community.  But they’re reduced to the role of scriveners.

It’s as if surgeons had to solicit a local vote on how to do kidney surgery or structural engineers had to ask the city council how much reinforcement to put into a foundation.

From many years as a consulting engineer, I know that paychecks and retirement planning are good, but that true job satisfaction comes from applying one’s knowledge and passion to improve a community.  That satisfaction is often denied to city planners.

This isn’t to say that public input has no value.  Indeed, if we gave all power to planners, they would soon run amok.  After all, power does corrupt.  But any rational approach to the use of planning knowledge would involve city planners helping to shape public opinion rather than being the silent chroniclers of it.

Better models are available.  The city of El Paso, Texas takes an aggressive approach to spreading knowledge about urbanism.  All top-level city employees, over 200 of them, are required to study for and to take the CNU-A exam.

Imagine living in a community where the knowledge of urbanism is spread throughout city hall, whether a citizen is talking with the finance director or the fire chief.  It ensures that an understanding of urbanism is disseminated throughout the community.  And it provides an environment in which city planners can be more forthcoming about their skills.

And it has made a difference in El Paso, where a vibrant urbanism culture filled with compact housing and transit options is quickly evolving.

I believe that a community is best served when the skills and experiences of all citizens are utilized to the greatest extent possible.  We can better meet that objective with city planning departments.  I’m sure my planner acquaintance would agree.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)