This week’s Future Here Now focuses on an issue that struck me over and over again while I was at the National Planning Conference last week. In many professions (urban planning being one of them), we say that we are doing what we are doing for the people - residents, customers, students, whatever - but we fail to deeply understand their motives, their desires and their behavior. Instead, we imagine how we think that they should respond to the ways that we change their environment.
And when they don’t respond like we expected, we shrug, or we explain it away, or we accuse them of not understanding their own needs, of not being rational.
From my perspective, the problem isn’t that our residents or customers aren’t rational actors. The problem is that too many of us who are in the business of creating solutions are more interested in our own visions than in understanding how other people actually think and work.
Big Idea
I have said before that I came into urban planning kind of sideways, and that shows.
I spent most of my 20s first as a teacher, the briefly as an archeologist’s assistant and then as a historic preservation consultant / public historian. The first time I was asked to be on a zoning commission, at about 26 or so, I didn’t know what zoning was.
After finishing graduate school at 32, I did something I completely didn’t expect to do, and ended up at a conventional engineering / planning firm. Comprehensive plans and zoning codes were the bread and butter for my new department.
The first time I got an inkling as to what a comprehensive plan was about, I was watching one of my colleagues (younger than me, but longer in this field). He had spread a large plot of a client city across one of those stand-up work tables,
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