It's almost impossible to go into any community in the United States and build traditional urbanism without having to change the codes and the regulations.
We are going to need some new Jane Jacobs’. She was of course an outsider that shook up the professions. Planning took up her ideals of mixed use, walkable places, but ignored everything about process reform and economics.
Look, the blunt reality is professions never reform themselves. There’s simply no good reason to do so. The more convoluted everything is, the more you need credentialed professionals to do the work for you.
Pressure has to come from outside. That’s either big grass roots pressure, or top-down pressure from somewhere else. We’ve begun to see inklings of both.
I'm constantly reminded of what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
Within planning, "lively debate" is well within the acceptable opinion.
We are going to need some new Jane Jacobs’. She was of course an outsider that shook up the professions. Planning took up her ideals of mixed use, walkable places, but ignored everything about process reform and economics.
Look, the blunt reality is professions never reform themselves. There’s simply no good reason to do so. The more convoluted everything is, the more you need credentialed professionals to do the work for you.
Pressure has to come from outside. That’s either big grass roots pressure, or top-down pressure from somewhere else. We’ve begun to see inklings of both.
I'm constantly reminded of what Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
Within planning, "lively debate" is well within the acceptable opinion.