Today’s radical idea is tomorrow’s mainstream policy
Real change comes when you stop pitching what people already agree with.
Community outreach can be rewarding and frustrating, sometimes during the same meeting. You might be advocating for something as basic as a bike lane extension and still get accused of ruining the neighborhood character.
Every planning process includes a form of persuasion, even if you don’t like that word. You're asking people to imagine something they don’t see today. You're asking them to care about a design detail they’ve never considered. And you're doing it all inside a shifting landscape of what's socially and politically acceptable.
This is where knowing about the Overton Window can dramatically help your advocacy.
Named for political scientist Joseph Overton in the 1990s, the window is the range of ideas considered acceptable in public discourse at any given time. The Overton Window defines the boundary of what people will take seriously. Policies outside the socially acceptable frame are ignored or mocked.
“Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu. They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time.”
—Joseph Lehman, colleague of Joseph Overton
This idea can give you a laser tight focus when you think about convincing people in your orbit to push for a better built environment. You can’t just bring people the best evidence because humans aren’t inspired to take action based on spreadsheets and trend lines. You have to help them see out of a totally different window to change what they believe is even possible.
History is full of ideas that began as heresy and ended as common sense:
Earth is not flat.
Germs cause disease.
Humans will communicate across the globe in real time.
A computer will fit in your pocket.
Children will receive cars as a rite of passage.
Art will be created by voice command.
White-collar jobs will exist entirely online.
Each of these began outside the Overton Window and each became normalized through cultural, technological, or political shifts. For each of those examples, to dwell on the claim ranged from silly to dangerous. In the grand human timeline, it wasn’t that long ago that a doctor would lose his entire livelihood if people caught wind that he blamed invisible stuff on your body for making you sick. And then seemingly all of a sudden, the reverse was true. “I don’t believe in germs” would end a physician’s career.
Urban planning is full of “unsayable” ideas. To shift the window, you need to start with what seems unreasonable, outrageous, or even utopian. When your initial idea stretches the imagination, your inevitable compromise still moves the needle. And over time, that once-laughable concept becomes the new baseline. Introduce radical scenarios, not to provoke for the sake of provocation, but to help people see out of a different window that has a wonderful view.
Practical conversations like reorganizing a street to make space for comfortable cycling still matter. Engineering decisions are still made within today’s boundaries. But if you’re pushing for culture change that promotes human flourishing, getting bogged down in arguments over the width of a painted buffer between parked cars and the bike lane isn’t going to shift the window. Instead, visualize the dream neighborhood, town, city, etc. and help others see what you see. Are kids riding bikes to the pool by themselves? Are seniors walking freely? Have severe crashes been eliminated? Are you free from the financial shackles of car dependency? Are streets quiet enough to flirt on a sidewalk? Does the street have a variety of home sizes, locally owned businesses, and fun places to hang out and people-watch?
Culture change requires an advocacy long game that makes space for ideas that seem politically impossible today. When enough people are talking about the ideal future, compromises are things like buses running 15 minutes apart instead of 5 minutes apart. You’ll think back to when you started and try to remember what it was like when your city had no reliable bus service.
When enough people take fringe ideas seriously, they stop being fringe.