Is admitting you have a problem the first step toward recovery? Or just a confession? | Nov 7th at 11:37am
Full disclosure: I’m here under false pretenses. I’m no journalist. I am a teacher and ivory tower kind of guy, with an amateur, unsupervised blog on the side for venting excess research steam. That blog is about what we don’t know about how cities work, succeed and fail, followed by unprocessed (and un-reviewed) brainstorming about how we might know more. It is about clarifying the questions, first, and the credibility of our attacks on those questions, second.
For that purpose, big questions with weak literatures work best. Climate change and urban design will do nicely.
This is an interesting set of issues not least because in many minds the solutions are already fairly clear, so the issue then becomes how to get there. I am deeply curious how far beyond this conventionally primitive assessment this conference will take us.
What is the problem?
The opening session included a brief presentations from Gary Hack, the immediate past dean of Penn Design, and Judith Roden, president of the sponsoring Rockefeller Foundation and past president of Penn, who set the stage by reference both to the 1958 Penn/RF conference—given credit for various influential late 20th century urban design initiatives—and the oil and urban crises of the 70s, and so on. Both linked these continuing challenges and debates to the challenges of the new century, not least climate change.
The first panel aimed to clarify the extent and nature of climate challenges.
Kolbert reminded us of many of the central trends, and some implied policy directives. Najam further emphasized the distributional consequences of these issues, along several dimensions. There are lots and lots of constituencies with competing goals. There are winners and losers, and transition issues. That is, there are economic, political, and social tradeoffs. While Orr challenged politicians to do the right thing, and assessed the problem as the consequences of our behaviors partly explained by priorities and distorted incentives, Najam implicitly clarified the difficulty of this and what that suggests about the prospects for real change. (His slide presentation was distractingly animation-heavy though.)
Knee-Jerk, I mean Real Time Blog Reaction
What I am not hearing are serious proposals for institutional and political reform, or even discussions of the feasibility of such efforts. I suppose the function of this opening panel is to put the key concerns and questions on the table for discussion in the breakout sections.
But in the very brief audience Q&A, a question from William Rees nailed a similar point in saying something along the lines of: “I’m concerned that there seems to be a great gulf between the urgency of the problem and the solutions we appear to be willing to make.” The panel response hesitantly emphasized the sensitive psychology of this tradeoff, and the value of making small, significant progress/victories. And the lack of political will. Caution was expressed about “large solutions,” that seem to accomplish much with relatively little effort and broad-base buy-in.
In other words, good question.
As more context, a key problem with this literature is not that it reasonably paints a grim picture of the consequences of an oil-dependent world economy, but that it tends to oversimplify how then to proceed in practice or theory—with respect to either mitigation or adaptation. Stop sprawl. Get people out of the cars (especially the Chinese and Indians, and Los Angelenos). Move us into compact, mixed use communities. ASAP. But each of these represents huge, extremely problematic tradeoffs that must be productively negotiated with full attention to the competing constituencies at each step of the way. It would be great if that wasn’t so but as H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is a simple solution. And it’s wrong.”
Let’s see how the breakout sessions draw this out, or cut it different ways.
Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
