You're Not an Unbiased Observer of Your City
Have you ever had the way you saw a familiar place completely change in the blink of an eye?
I had one of those moments the other morning. And I'm writing about it because it both embarrassed and humbled me, but also reaffirmed for me something I believe strongly about the work of city-building: that it has to be done, always, with humility.
The moment I'm talking about is very simple: I tried to push my three-month-old in a stroller around the neighborhood my wife grew up in.
Let me explain.
I've spent a fair amount of time in Scranton, Pennsylvania with my in-laws over the past decade, and have always found Scranton to be a city with a kind of run-down charm. That's a bit euphemistic: it's an old Northeastern city whose wealthiest days are long behind it (though they've left behind excellent urban bones in many ways) and which has dire budget issues. One casualty of decades of tight budgets has been sidewalks. Scranton, like many cities, has delegated sidewalk provision and maintenance to individual property owners, and the results, even in well-to-do neighborhoods, are...scattershot at best.
And yet it never bothered me. I always kind of liked the sidewalks here: I found the irregular hodgepodge of materials charming and the ruggedness authentically in keeping with a place whose age and soft decay is a big part of its appeal. It was part of the fun of going for a walk in the same way that a photogenic crumbling wall or weathered sign is.
Then I tried to push a stroller around the neighborhood. And it wasn't fun. My daughter didn't much appreciate the, uh, off-roading experience either. We ended up mostly walking in the street, where I was on high alert for speeding drivers. (Fortunately, it's mostly a neighborhood of naturally slow streets...but it was still a less than relaxing walk.)
The experience was jarring. In a neighborhood I've known for ten years, it was as if I had just put on glasses for the first time. I spent the rest of the walk, and have spent the several days since, hyper-aware of every barrier I see to mobility around me, imagining the place through the eyes of not just a parent with a stroller, but also a wheelchair user or an older person unsteady on their feet.
The Limits of Expertise
It's important to me that you understand that I'm not telling you this because I was somehow oblivious, before last week, to the need to consider everyone's mobility in planning and not just that of able-bodied adults. I'm telling you this specifically because I already knew that.
By way of context, I am a new parent still figuring out this parent thing. But by way of other context, I am not new to this sidewalk thing. I spent two years earning a graduate degree in urban planning, and many more years before that reading and thinking about city-building.
A major emphasis of that time, both in and out of school, has been the importance of inclusivity. The better part of my grad school Public Participation course was about the heavy defects of most public-engagement processes. I can tell you all about how whole groups of people are systematically underrepresented in public meetings and other public-comment venues, and therefore in setting the planning agenda. Those underrepresented groups include parents (you need child care if you're going to a public meeting!), lower-income people and especially non-9-to-5 workers (can't make the meeting time!), people with disabilities (can't get to the meeting!), people without cars (ditto), renters (less likely to be informed of the meeting in the first place), and the young (less likely to feel comfortable and knowledgeable about how to participate).
So I know this stuff. And yet it's never been top of mind when I think about this place. Which makes me wonder what else isn't top of mind—even in places I have much more of a stake in, and ability to influence—that would be if I had had a different set of experiences there.
Expertise is no inoculation against our tendency to pay attention to what we want to pay attention to. When city planning or the design of our neighborhoods doesn't respond to people's real, on-the-ground needs, it's never because the experts didn't have enough studies, data, handbooks or best practices at their disposal. It's always because the process didn't put the people who experience that place at the center.
Green Ridge neighborhood, Scranton, PA. Photo by Daniel Herriges.
If you take away from this essay that every neighborhood should have sidewalks that are smooth and standardized enough to easily push a stroller around, you've missed the point. That might seem like an inarguable goal, a policy without any downside worthy of consideration (let's go ahead and say the charm and authenticity I describe above doesn't rate next to people's need to move around safely). But in a world of scarce resources and arguably even scarcer attention and political capital, there are always opportunity costs to any chosen priority.
I didn't mention before that the neighborhood I'm describing in Scranton is the wealthiest within city limits. The mayor is often from here. It's also known for large families (Irish Catholic heritage is strong here) with 5 or 6 or 8 kids. Strollers are everywhere. If my experience should not have been revelatory to me, I guarantee it's not revelatory to the actual residents of Green Ridge. So maybe smoother sidewalks are in fact not a local priority. My wife's reaction to my baby-walking struggles (paraphrased: "Eh, I used to nanny around here, and I never thought it was a big deal") suggests as much.
The experiences of the neighborhood's residents—including those who have disabilities or difficult work schedules or otherwise are likely to be excluded from public engagement—would certainly inform a set of urgent priorities for city investment and attention here. The point is that I, as an "expert" planner, don't know what they would be. I am utterly unqualified to identify what those priorities ought to be. And anyone in a design or policy profession needs from time to time to have a similar realization and be humbled by it.
The stakes of sidewalks in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of shady streets and elegant houses are comparatively low. There are other contexts in which the stakes are infinitely higher. The national news backdrop of the past few months—from the coronavirus to police violence and social unrest—reminds us of that, as does the ongoing conversation about what it would mean to meaningfully commit to the safety and well-being on our streets of our Black neighbors, our disabled neighbors, our essential worker neighbors, instead of, as Alissa Walker provocatively put it in a widely-shared Curbed essay, using them as props to advance "urbanist fantasies."
These four simple steps describe a process in which local government invests its resources in response to the real, immediate struggles of residents.
Experts Can’t Set the Agenda Alone
Have you had an experience like mine where something snapped into focus about a place or situation you already thought you saw with clear eyes? If you have, let it sit with you. Let it make you uncomfortable.
Let it expose to you the delusion that you are a rational, objective observer of your surroundings. And remind you of the messier, less satisfying truth that you are constantly seeing everywhere you go filtered through familiar narratives that tell you which facts or observations matter. We can't help but do this; the amount of raw information we are bombarded with would otherwise be impossible to distill into a coherent, even imperfect, understanding of a place. A single neighborhood, after all, is home to hundreds of lives, each as rich and complex and intertwined with others as your own. The task of building places that enhance those lives is an incredibly tall order.
I am actually a strong defender of the role of expertise in building such places. I chafe at the anti-intellectual notion that better public policy would be achieved if we simply put everything to a vote of the public. (I expect, among other things, that we'd build a lot more stroads and free parking.) Experts with advanced training are uniquely qualified to anticipate—based on accumulated empirical evidence—the likely consequences of a particular design or policy intervention, and to spark and facilitate conversation about those consequences. Experts can help guide people to better ways of enhancing their well-being: help them live a good life in a prosperous and resilient place.
What experts are uniquely unqualified to do is to go out into a place and unilaterally set the agenda: to discern what that place's pressing needs and threats and opportunities are. That must be a collective, at least somewhat unguided, emergent process that involves everyone. Or, as my stroller walk reminded me in one small way last week, we're going to miss things that are right under our noses.
(Cover photo by freestocks on Unsplash.)
During a recent Planning Commission meeting in Windsor, California, Vice Chair Tim Zahner advocated for using the Strong Towns approach to make the city's streets safer.