As a credentialed city planner, the most I’ve enjoyed so far are some extra initials to put after my name and the opportunity log some certification maintenance credits.

Jane Jacobs does not hide her distain for credentialed professionals. It’s not a matter of the people, it’s that the credential itself provides a shield under which professionals/researchers can hide from fruitful feedback through the course of scientific inquiry. She cites an example of where the work of 80 CDC researchers was trumped by one sociology grad student; the work of the former was given instant credence through academic journals, but was, in Jacobs’ view, worthless.

So, here’s where my profession fails - at least in keeping a scientific state of mind. This is going to take at least two days worth of posts.

As a reminder, here are the steps Jacobs outlines:

1. The fruitful question
2. Frame a hypothetical answer
3. Test that answer (or observe real world tests of that question, as in social sciences)
4. Ask more fruitful questions based on findings

The first failure is obvious: failing to ask a fruitful question.

Planners frequently become “zoners.” That is, those who deal with zoning, or, in the oxymoron of the profession, “current planners.” The question this subset most frequently asks: Does this proposal meet the zoning requirements?

Not fruitful.

Maybe it’s time I explained what Jacobs means by “fruitful.”

“Fruitful” means that the question must take into account, as far as possible, everything already known about the object, event, or process under scrutiny and, amid this richness of information, must single out a salient mystery or obscurity. “Science abandoned,” Dark Age Ahead (p66)

Most zoning regulations control land use, primarily, though it regulates other factors, such as performance, form, area, and density. Land use is the organizing principle. Some decry Euclidean zoning, named for a town in Ohio and not the geometry, for its separation of uses. For the sake of the non-credentialed reader I’ll avoid going into composite, pyramid, exclusionary or other such abstractions of this system.

This type of zoning arose in the early 20th century in response to a fruitful question: How can we separate uses to prevent conflicts or nuisances? Think of the public health, safety, and general welfare!

The hypothetical answer: What if we separate these uses in different districts?

For factory workers sans transit, living in walking distance of the factory gate was a must. You might debate the classist imposition of such a solution, but that’s beyond the point here (see posts on planning moralisms).

For those lamenting the high, possibly unforeseen consequences that arose from this solution, such as sprawl, that’s also beyond the point here.

The point here is that the system of inquiry stopped. There is little chance for proper feedback. The hypothetical answer becomes the untested solution. Zoners ignore real world feedback - the only on the ground testing.

Some are looking at the real world data in this case. There are some interesting solutions, such as form-based coding. But, the barriers to overhaul a zoning code are political and fiscal. The feedback does not have an easy path to travel.

More missteps tomorrow…

Development, evolution, progress - they all imply a direction; they all fall into a teleological trap. We’re coming off a centuries long modernist binge where human ideas and effort would continue to advance us all, by and by.

Alternately, historians and cultural storytellers identified cycles. The world was not getting better, by and by: revolving, not evolving. Others have seen similar cycles in the decline and revitalization/gentrification of urban districts (similar to Jacobs on “unslumming and slumming”).

I’m not not enough of an intellectual historian to know how far back a mashup of these views go. You can see how they could: time on the x-axis, another variable on the y-axis. Despite dips, the overall trend is up.

Hegel put ideas on the y-axis. Marx adapted that for economies and classes. Since I’m using Schumpeter (of the “creative destruction” idea mentioned previously) you could throw him in too, though I’m not as familiar with his work to know if it fits. There are certainly models of economic growth, such as the business cycle, that others might fit on a similar chart.

Ignoring all this doodling and academic-like name dropping, there’s one question worth asking: Why must things trend up?

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I don’t have any unified theory of how this all works based on entropy or geometry, despite the collection of ideas I’ve trumpeted above. However, thanks to my liberal arts education, these things rattle around in my head and collide. I’m reminded of Septimus Hodge from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia - another consequence of my liberal arts education.

So, what is it good for?

I get what Jacobs is saying about systems and corrective stabilization because I’ve had amazing teachers who have taught me how to approach, observe, and think about such things.

Some people think optimistically that if things get bad enough, they will get better because of the reaction of beneficent pendulums. When a culture is working wholesomely, beneficent pendulum swings—effective feedback—do occur. “The hazard,” Dark Age Ahead (p21)

If that culture is enfeebled as institutions fail (the chapters in Dark Age Ahead that I’ve been reviewing look at these institutions), Jacobs concludes, “Beneficent corrections of deterioration are not guaranteed.” (p24)

This brief episode of Americanness we’re in is not guaranteed as some “city on a hill” as Puritan John Winthrop cribbed from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

I love being generic and saying “things.” Of course there are things that trend up. Sometimes we mistake what exactly those things are. I’ve been thinking some on “creative destruction” since reading “Barack Hoover Obama” by Kevin Baker in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s a great history lesson on Hoover’s mistakes coming out of the Roaring ’20s, going into the Great Depression. According to Baker, Hoover mistook “business progressivism” as one of those things - that was the teleological trap he fell into.

Baker makes parallels between Hoover and Obama. He fears Obama may fall into a similar trap. It makes me want to go back through some of Obama’s rhetoric and find some of the instances where he sounded more like Franklin Roosevelt, audacious enough to hope that his presidency won’t end up in the same trap.

It’s not hard to see why the Great Depression had such an enduring impact. It’s here that Jane Jacobs finds the seeds of consensus in this country to do all to avoid mass unemployment. She claims that during the 1960s, universities picked up the task of credentialing, rather than education

People with the task of selecting successful job applicants want them to have desirable qualities such as persistence, ambition, and ability to cooperate and conform, to be a “team player.” At a minimum, achieving a four-year university or college degree, no matter in what subject, seems to promise these traits. “Credentialing versus educating,” Dark Age Ahead (p44-45).

The university as a screening process - the institution a growth industry, the students buying a service they hope will help them in the job market - not so great, long term.

I love education. I went through two land grant universities. I studied next to plenty of students simply biding their time. The university was happy for their tuition payments.

I still learned plenty, and had access to amazing resources and professors. Yet, still, as my resume marches out there my credentials don’t look all that different. My young career holds little pudding in which to find proof.

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Jacobs records her own stories of the Great Depression that held much less import than the image of the bread line. She was in her late teens and early twenties. Struggles and frugality we great fodder for stories to share with friends. Those who saw their way of life change after so much investment in a business or career did not share her joy.

I’m trying to decide where I might fall. My career has barely begun. I’m not alone. Something significant is changing, even in my own field.

I have Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on my mind as I’m finishing Kevin Baker’s article on “Barack Hoover Obama” in the July Harper’s. It’s a great lesson about the Great Depression, if nothing else. Let’s see if it makes for a good post tomorrow.