Planning Expert-ise

I've been thinking lately about the interaction between politics and land-use planning, and one of the questions that keeps nagging me is thus: the divide between "experts" and "non-experts".


The problem - in planning, as it is in other fields - is often that non-experts* (e.g. residents like Jane Jacobs, media figures like Karl Rove) and the experts (e.g. architects such as Le Corbusier, neuroscience experts like Sam Wang) don't see eye to eye. The non-experts will claim (sometimes correctly) that the experts have bad models, that they are over-emphasizing particular "data points" and ignoring others. The experts (sometimes correctly) point out that the non-experts are letting emotion/politics/self-interest get in the way of their judgement.

(* It might seem baseless to refer to Jane Jacobs as a "non-expert", but I mean in a purely educational/practical way. Certainly, she's been highly influential on the planning practice.)

Of course (as both sides sometimes smugly point out) the other side isn't always "right". Sometimes the reasons they "get it wrong" are due to ignorance or even "acts of God" (Hurricane Sandy may or may not have handed Obama his second term, but it certainly didn't hurt his chances). Hence the challenge: we know that non-experts are sometimes wrong, and that experts are also sometimes wrong (how often they are I leave up to the reader), but if we can imagine that there is some hypothetical "right" answer, our task is therefore to bring both sides together in agreement.

Maybe that involves teaching the non-experts why your architectural plan will have a minimum impact on the surrounding neighbourhood. Maybe that involves the experts getting out of their jargon and models and trying to see if there isn't something they're missing. How that happens can be difficult. "How do you do that?" can therefore be a really good question! Let me give a real planning example.

There was a development proposal in the east end of Toronto, regarding some in-fill development (the summer I worked at the City of Toronto, there were a number of schools up for redevelopment). It was a fairly old neighbourhood and therefore sported quite a bit of Victorian-style housing. The developers had already done some pre-consultation with the neighbourhood, but this was their first official public meeting with an actual proposal in hand. The neighbours were concerned about many of the typical issues, such as traffic, who would be moving into the neighbourhood, and whether the units would be good for families.

One of the bigger issues that came up during a public meeting however, was the style of the proposed units. Certainly, not everybody liked the proposed design, but the biggest concern wasn't that the houses were ugly, but rather, that they weren't Victorian. During the initial pre-consultation, the developer's mock-ups had used Victorian-style models to illustrate the impact of the development on the neighbourhood in terms of size and density. But their proposal was something much more modern. Many residents (and the councillor!) felt there had been a kind of "bait-and-switch", to (what I believe was) the amazement/befuddlement of the developer. How does planning/the experts address this?

Certainly, they could design some "fake" Victorian architecture, but who would they be fooling? Clearly, there was a room full of people who were disappointed. The initial reaction from the developer, which amounted to basically, "uh, you know we don't need anyone's permission to design them the way we want them to look", went over about as well as you can imagine with a crowd whose feelings for the proposal was, at best, tepid.

Even the architect was flustered as to how to respond. He ended up trying to justify his design by orally recounting his CV. Which, well, might be impressive, but why should your education and experience shield you from criticism? I think this speaks to one of the problems that experts have, in that they can sometimes end up defending their qualifications rather than their project.

2009 image of 22 Grange Ave, "Patcher Hall", copyright 2012 Google. Note: not the area I'm referring to below.

But, after thinking on the sidelines for a bit (while the deluge of complaints continued), the architect said something that I think helped communicate his design to the residents that gave the proposal's design a "bigger picture". He said that sometimes the best way to highlight the features of an area (such as Victorian architecture), is to perversely build something completely different. A uniquely designed building can have the benefit of both being interesting (in the context of a fairly uniform neighbourhood), as well as highlighting the surrounding buildings by standing out of the crowd.

Certainly, it's not as easy an equation as different = better, but rather that done properly, everyone (potentially) can walk away a winner; the architect can design (what he feels) is a high quality building that will sell well, and the neighbors can walk away knowing that the house they live in will in fact gain in character/value. And in a weird way, this made the proposal more agreeable while changing absolutely nothing about it. I think planning often can feel byzantine to the public (because the framework is well, byzantine), so figuring out ways to cross the divide between expert and non-expert is crucial, and doing so sometimes requires being creative in how you address concerns.

(Of course, how the darn units looked would have zero impact on the traffic, so there was still some negotiation to do.)