Quick thought:
Just as Google Maps and Google Earth emerged and found a receptive audience beyond traditional GIS users, maybe responses to climate change are going to come from unlikely sources, much faster than the traditional channels? It won’t be planners retooling and rapidly scaling their responses, as Bomee suggested, but instead being blindsided by X, whatever X may be. Are planners going to be leading, or trying to keep up?
A positive example: the inventive Show Us A Better Way, leading through following.
7 Responses
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I think the leading/following characterization is simple. In the post you refer to, I proposed that:
* The planner acts as an enabler in a network of equally capable actors
* The planner builds frameworks instead of or in addition to plans
* The planner accepts a mandate to share data and methodology
By “network of equally capable actors”, I was suggesting that leadership might come from lots of places, and I guess the implicit threat, if you want to characterize it that way, is that expertise from other sectors *will* blindside us, the planners.
On the other hand, planners are specialists in many ways, and there are things that lie in the center of our domains — so even if great ideas show up from other places, there might be times when WE the planners become the barriers.
The “show us a better way” thing is so exciting!
I wasn’t thinking that planners are threatened by leadership or innovation from other places. Rather, we might hold things up, inadvertently, because ‘the cloud’ or crowd wisdom or whatever we call it seems more effective and agile at dealing with new challenges.
And that’s where the benefits of open source ideas come in, IF we can be flexible enough to adopt them.
And Show Us A Better Way is somewhat a (healthy) admission that planners on the inside can’t be innovative. It’s very telling that the projects they chose are not glitz or edge-pushing. Instead, they’re simple but useful tools like recycling info by postcode (zip code to you).
I agree with you! To figure out how we get planning practice and education to get us in the habit of “being flexible enough to adopt them” and, as the Show Us a Better Way does, encourage folks to figure out new and useful things to do with what we already have — that’s what we’re talking about on this blog, right?
To make this a planning issue, I think we need to treat it like a planning issue: gather our thoughts on the theory and history side of things (eg. isn’t this an off-shoot of Don Schon’s work?), look at where these tendencies have cropped up in practice, come up with a planning vocabulary to talk about it, etc.
I guess I’m not sure I understand the distinction between a framework and a plan. Plans, by definition, have variable levels of resolution and focus on different things. There is no such thing as a generalist master plan covering all things. There are always elements of a plan that remain unresolved, and that are probably unresolvable at the time the plan was made.
For example, a plan to improve the sustainability of a neighborhood may be structured as (i) an overall mission and set of objectives (e.g., improve water management and reduce aquifer withdrawals), (ii) a framework of sustainability targets that support those objectives (e.g., reduce aquifer withdrawals pr incremental development, relative to some baseline, by 70%), (iii) a process for identifying, choosing, developing, and siting/designing strategies that enable achievement of those targets (e.g., zero water use for landscaping regulation, combined with selection of xeric and/or native vegetation, with regulatory and transitional policies and a landscape design master plan as part of that strategy), and (iv) a framework for implementation (e.g., timeline, budget, etc.). All of these overall objectives/mission, frameworks, processes, procedures, regulatory interventions, and, yes, physical master plans together comprise the planners’ “plan” (many planners and non-planners will likely be involved in that plan’s creation and execution).
Al, thanks for pointing out the difficulty in coming up with the right vocabulary for talking about this issue.
I’m trying to talk about “framework” for “platform” specifically in the context of sharing all the stuff that gets collected (data, processes, people-resources) as a part of coming up with the “plan”.
The hypothesis is that there are opportunities to improve the speed and scalability of planning practice by incorporating an “open source” paradigm for BOTH the end products of planning AND the intermediate goo that goes on during the planning process.
See Alison’s post Platform, Not Just Product