Habits of professionals

 

Two ideas of Charles Montgomery:

… cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth; they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being…

The dispersed city lives not only in the durability of buildings, parking lots, and highways, but also in the habits of professionals who make our cities.

A question of mine:

What role do professionals have in the design of our cities – and our entrenchment, replication and expansion of our current city pattern?

In a recent post, Cities design our lives, I touched on Charles Montgomery’s notion of autopoieisis in cities: that cities, like many other systems, are prone to reproduce themselves. So what is the role of the professional in this process? The engineers, architects, landscape architects and city planners?

Let’s start by getting clear on the roles in city making.  Marilyn Hamilton offers four perspectives of the city, each of which has a distinct and essential role in the creation and recreation of the city (check out Integral City):

4 quadrants - city lego playmobil

  1. Citizens express the centre of gravity of the city’s values. In democratic countries, citizens have the power to elect and criticize the other voices in the city.  They have power as intentional consumers. They express the power of engagement and intention.  They are the voice of the city spirit.
  2. Civic managers are the voice of city expertise; they are the guides  that oversee the needs of the city.  They are the people who work at city hall, school boards, health institutions on our behalf.  They are the voice of the city brain.
  3. Civic developers are the people who traditionally ‘conceive of, invest in and build the infrastructure of the city’.  These voices focus on the future – the vision and promise of the city.
  4. Civil society are the cultural voice of the city. These are the social organizations and non-government organizations that attend to the social needs of the city. They are the voices of the city’s heart.

While the dispersed city is the result of the habits of professionals, it is also the result of what we expect of professionals.  City-building professionals are city managers work in city hall, reporting to the elected officials who are chosen by the citizens. City-building professionals also work for civic developers (or are developers) who are responding to the consumer choices of citizens, as well as to the rules and incentives established by the civic managers. Moveover, all of these roles are responding to the cultural voice of the city and civil society.

These roles are a network of feedback loops that, all together, are the dance of city making. The city-building professionals shape the perspectives, and are shaped themselves by the perspectives. The habits of professionals have influence and are influenced.

This means that the whole city system needs to see, and make, the shift toward a more sustainable, or happy, city. We are all a part of it. And yes, there are habits of professionals – and everyone else’s habits in what is expected of professionals.

Professions support the status quo and push new things, but the new things only happen when the decision makers decide to make the new things happen. And those decision makers are everywhere: in city hall, in living rooms, in board rooms, and in community centres. Everyone’s work on the margin, promoting and trying out new ideas, is essential for us to see what else is possible for our cities.

Remember this: city-building professionals are required to serve the public interest.

In your city, who is talking about whether your city is serving the public interest?

 

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I’ve posted a couple times about Charles Montgomery’s Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design. Here they are for you to explore:

 

 

Cities design our lives

 
It is audacious to believe that the city might build happiness just by changing its shape. 
 
But it is foolish not to chase the thought, because around the world, and especially amid the sprawls capes of modern North America, the evidence shows that cities do indeed design our lives. 
 
Charles Montgomery (p. 43)

A simple syllogism for you: A. The design of our cities impacts our social networks. B. The quality of our social networks impacts the quality of our lives. C. Therefore, the design of our cities impacts the quality of our lives.  And since we design our cities, we are also designing the quality of our lives – our personal, individual lives and also the lives of others. The places we make shape us.

Charles Montgomery, in Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design, writes,

A healthy social network looks like the root of a tree. From the most important relationships at the heart of the network, thinner roots stretch-out to contacts of different strength and intensity. Most people’s root networks are contracting, closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents, and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows (p. 54).

People are increasingly solitary and we are at risk of falling – individually and collectively – when the wind blows. For Montgomery, this is because of our changing social habitat (marriages are not lasting as long; people work longer hours; people move more frequently) as well as our physical habitat (increased commute times; less trust found in monofunctional, car-dependant neighbourhoods than in walkable neighbourhoods with diverse housing, shops and places to work). The research is showing that social habitats struggle when our physical habitat in cities allows for dispersal (see Chapter 3 – The (Broken) Social Scene).  Our proximity to each other is important.

Here’s Montgomery’s take on how we got here:

  1. Put everything in its right place. Zoning, the rules that tell us what we can and can not do on our land that emerged first in the 1880s to ban laundries from a California city’s core, have “ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse and dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban fringe and beyond… And they have ensured that these new developments will, in turn, resist most efforts to change or adapt them over time (p. 69).”
  2. We lost the shared street. When cars first arrived on our streets, our streets were shared places for everyone: “The road was a market, a playground, a park, and yes, it was a thoroughfare… It was a chaotic environment littered with horse dung and fraught with speeding carriages, but a messy kind of freedom reigned (p. 69). As cars and trucks emerged in American cities in the 1920s, road culture was transformed: “more than two hundred thousand people were killed in motor accidents in the United States that decade. Most were killed in cities. Most of the dead were pedestrians. Half were children and youth (p. 70 [1]).” The subsequent design – and subsidized financing – of city streets put motorists first.
  3. Freedom for cars to move. Futurama, “a vast pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York… showed people the wondrous world they would inhabit in 1960 if cities embraced the Motordom vision (p. 73).” Futurama was characterized by speed, “sleek highways propelling citizens from orderly cities to pristine open spaces (p. 73).” 24 million people saw the exhibit and the high speed philosophy; the cultural shift toward the automobile lifestyle was cemented (p. 73).” The sponsor: Shell Oil.
  4. The momentum of autopoiesis. Cities are a system that, like many others, are prone to entrenchment, replication and expansion. “Once the system of dispersal was established in early suburbs, it began to repeat itself in plan after plan – not because it was the best response to any particular place, but because of the momentum of autopoieisis (p. 75).” It is easier to repeat work that has been done before – and it fuelled and age of unprecedented wealth.

But the choice is not between suburbs and downtown; “We must redesign both landscapes and the fabric that connects them in ways that answer the needs that led us to retreat in the first place (p. 77).” To do this, we must examine how our physical environment affects how we feel. To do this, we need to examine what influences our health and controls our behaviour. For Montgomery, we need to understand the psychology of the urban world and then make decisions about our place in the urban world.

We design our cities; cities design our lives.

We can choose to build places that make us feel good.

What are the qualities of urban places that make you feel good?

 

 

Note –

[1] Norton, Peter D., Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 21.

 

See your city in a new light

 

People chasing their passions are changing how we see our cities. Patricio Davilo and Dave Colangelo, graduate students at Ryerson University reflected the weather, and homelessness, to the surrounding streets in a reactive architecture installation. How’s that for a feedback loop?

Intheairtonight - Ryerson U
Source – Ryerson University

What does your city need to see? 

 

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For more information on In the air, tonight:

  1. http://intheairtonight.org/# 
  2. Ryerson University’s February 5, 2014 media statement
  3. CBC’s Nora Young talks Responsive Architecture with  Patricio Davilo and Dave Colangelo.   Here’s the interview.

 

 

Nourishing transformations

 

Our cities are transforming, and so is the role of planners in the midst of this transformation.

Last month, I hosted a conversation at the Canadian Association of Planning Students annual conference about transformations, to give them an opportunity to dig into what they know and see. Here’s what we found.

We are transforming into organizers. We think of planning as a linear, mechanistic activity but cities don’t work that way. What’s coming is a new social habitat, so we played with this idea using a World Cafe, using these new operating principles:

  1. Create places for you and others to experiment
  2. Know and trust that the transformation never ends – it’s  a never-ending quest
  3. Cities will forever learn and adapt, and they will only learn and grow as much as we – the component parts – learn and grow
  4. Choose to swim, rather than float

So here’s what the students noticed.

The best stuff and what we're transforming into
What is the best stuff happening in our cities? What are we transforming into?

There’s great stuff underway in our cities and we are transforming into cities that are about people. We are paying more attention to public spaces, to diversity, to our cultures. We celebrate with food and festivals. There is a shift underway, where we share more. Technology and social media are changing how we look at our cities and planners. Everything is more visible.

And we face significant challenges.

The challenges and vulnerabilities
What are the challenges we face? What are our vulnerabilities?

When we resist change, we are at our most vulnerable.  We are lured by convenience. Small thinking and  lack of vision make us vulnerable. We feel the pressure to do it “right,” yet it is not possible to know what is coming. We grapple with the unknown. The choices we make matter. The leadership we create and support matters.

There is a way through.

Planners role through
What role do you want to play to move through these vulnerabilities?

Look at the whole. Grasp a vision and keep it in mind. It’s not about sacrifice, its about choice, and choosing to be informed and to inform. It’s about facilitating understanding, so that we can hold and consider new possibilities. Its about respecting and honouring roles and responsibilities, but also challenging them to see and pursue new possibilities. It’s about improvement.

We have no idea what we are transforming into. We just know that its underway. And we can transform into what works for us, or what does not. The only way we’ll get what we want is if we choose to engage with the transformation.

What transformations are taking place that you wish to nourish?   

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This post is a wee bit of the book I am working on, while I am working on it. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City – The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:

 

Your role in citizen engagement

 

In last week’s edition of Nest City News, I made a provocative statement – citizens choose to engage.

Here’s the rub – they do choose, but how do our decisions as community leaders encourage or discourage their choices to get involved in city decision-making? How can we, as leaders on city council, in city administration or in our community organizations and businesses create the conditions for citizens to choose to engage, and choose to engage well? As leaders, we need to look to ourselves, and what we believe, first.

Last week I shared 10 conditions that encourage citizens to involve themselves. Here’s a reframe of these for those of you in leadership roles. As a leader, you will best work with others when you:

  1. Bring your best self. Leave the negative at the door and appreciate all points of view, all sources of information. When you bring your best self, so will others. You set the stage.
  2. Create time and space for people to tell stories. Stories are ways for people to connect to what matters to them, and to each other, even when they have differences in opinion. This feels like it takes a lot of time, but its about moving slow to move wise and fast later. Stories allow us to see what is really going on.
  3. Trust that people want to contribute and take responsibility. This is a choice for you as a leader. If you believe that people have something to offer, you will see it. If you do not believe this, you will not see it. Be open to be surprised.
  4. Offer minimal structure. Too little structure means confusion. Too much structure stifles what people have to offer and closes off opportunities for communication and collaboration. Find the balance of just the right amount of structure for the processes you use to work with each other.
  5. Pursue unusual partnerships. Get together and bust the silos right from the start. To engage a wide variety of people, you don’t have to do it alone. Partner with unusual people and organizations to broaden your reach. Integrate points of view from the outset.
  6. Practice working with each other. It isn’t good enough to organize for a one-time relationship. Or even a series of meetings that will end at the end of a project. Build longer-term relationships and spend time talking about how you can work together, and under what conditions it works best.
  7. Take action. All the possibilities in front of us can paralyze us from taking action. The specifics of how to proceed can also paralyze. If the intention is to build relationships, we don’t worry about specifics because we are also agreeing to learn to work together. We do not need a specific plan about how to work together. We just need to get started.
  8. Pause to look at what’s really going on. Take time alone, and with the people you engage, to reflect on your relationship, what its for, what is working well and what needs to be improved. This allows you and your colleagues to bring your best selves.

City governments are making more efforts than ever to involve citizens in their decision-making, and it is not easy or clean-cut work. It is messy . The processes city governments use to make decisions are complicated and take years of experience to understand. Residents get frustrated. City governments get frustrated.

Many citizens engage themselves because of their interest to improve some aspect of city life. Others, get engaged when something is going wrong, there’s something they don’t like – NIMBY (not in my back yard). This needs to be said – there is nothing wrong with when a citizens chooses to engage. Everyone is busy making contributions to our city life and it is not reasonable to expect all people to be engaged in all things at all times.

Are we ready to involve citizens when they choose to engage?

In what ways do you go beyond the usual to engage citizens in your city work?

 

 

Circling up in Winnipeg

 

Ever notice how when something is on your mind, more of it comes to you?

I was looking forward to the start of a big meeting in Winnipeg last weekend, where we were bringing people together from across Canada to chart out a new path for a national organization. I knew we were going to sit in a circle to start  our meeting, and the day before we started, as I was walking through Winnipeg to get to our meeting place at The Forks, I noticed circles everywhere I went.

It felt like Winnipeg – and The Forks – was getting ready to host leaders from across the continent, a role this place, where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet, has played for over 6000 years. I also felt Winnipeg was helping me circle up with my Self, and the place in which we were meeting, to prepare.

As a shape in which to have a conversation, the circle allows us to more fully see and hear each other.

The only thing in the way is ourselves.

 

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Every building builds your city

 

Every time a building is built, we are shaping our city, whether its the new garage on your block, or Calgary’s new landmark library. The site and the architects, Snohetta of Norway, have been chosen; they are now in design mode to figure out what shape the new building will take, and how, potentially, how it will add to Calgary’s East Village neighbourhood and the city as a whole.

The influence on Calgary will, of course, be a physical change. It will have more than 50% more floor space than the current central library it will replace, around the corner. As a destination, it will change the physical travel patterns in the city. It will also reinforce use of Calgary’s CTrain: it will be built right over the line.

The new building will also change the social landscape in Calgary. Here’s what library board chair Janet Hutchinson said to Jason Markusoff, of Post Media: “In the age of Google, Calgary’s libraries have never been so busy. Calgarians want public places of learning, innovation and collaboration where everyone belongs.” By building a building, we build a place for learning, innovation and collaboration.

And we also add to our identity. Socially, having such a place will change the psyche of Calgary. So, too, will the ultimate design of the building. The foreign architects have noted the natural landscape surrounding this site and they are inspired. Snohetta architect Craig Dykers imagines a building that captures the chinook arch, or the way the snow moves across the landscape.

The building will be an artistic understanding of Calgary’s place.

The library board, the architect, the East Village development agency are all city builders.

And so are you as you build that garage,

or landscape your yard,

or start a community garden,

or build a new strip mall.

How do you build your city?

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This post is part of a series of posts that offer bits of the book I am working on. Here are some plot helpers for Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:

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Electoral energy

North Glenora Q3

I have been moderating a series of election forums across my city and I am in awe of the energy candidates for civic office put into their campaigns. Last night was the third evening I have spent with Ward 6 candidates, and they have come a long way since I first saw them in action a month ago.

In my last post, I asked:  In what ways are you an evolutionary agent for your city?

Running for office is one way to be an evolutionary agent for your city. Each candidate plays a critical role in how the city speaks for itself. As I reflect on last night’s forum, I recognize the candidates that are tired and just want the marathon to be over. There are others that clearly have more energy to spend. Some are less clear in what they have to say, while others have honed their pitch. For some, this has been a huge learning experience and you can see it on the stage in their newfound comfort speaking to a crowd.

More importantly, as the differences between the candidates become more distinct, the choices for the city become more distinct. Perhaps this is the real energy the city receives from election season. It fuels our sense of how we see ourselves because we have to make a choice.

And we need candidates with different points of view enable the choice. All candidates, all views, all perspectives, are part of our collective movement.

Elections fuel what we imagine our city needs to be to serve us well.

Electoral energy helps each of us – and our city – learn about who we want to be.

North Glenora Q2

North Glenora Q1

 

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This post concludes a series of posts on Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

Next up – Chapter 10 – The Emerging City

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Citizens are city makers

 

I am learning about what I am writing while I am writing. While I sit here, I shape what I write and in return my writing is shaping me and what I write next. Its the same endless loop, on a grander scale, at work in our cities too.

Last week, as I wrapped up my exploration of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange last week, I sent off my latest newsletter, The Nest City News, declaring that you are a city maker. The 4 principles and 6 practices for city making that emerged on the Nest City Blog last week found a new home and audience. And the words “you are a city maker” stood out loud and clear, for readers and for me too.  How I think of this chapter has simplified to these words: you are a city maker.

As I head into my exploration of Chapter 9 – Enduring Civic Practice, I realize that my working title for this chapter needs to adjust too. If you are a city maker, then any discussion of civic practice is truly about this: be the best citizen you can be.

Everyone of us have a hand in the creation and recreation of our cities. The posts that follow offer some ideas and practices to help you be the best citizen you can be – for your self and your city. To start, off the top of your head,

What do you do to be the best citizen you can be? 

 

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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