Conflict in our society

It's been a very long time since I’ve blogged, for a variety of reasons. One simple one is that just producing the videos for unPlanned consumes an inordinate amount of time and the prospect of sitting down and writing about my episodes is often a bridge too far. That’s too bad, because it’s good to reflect in the written word about what one has produced, or had a hand in producing, for the spoken word.

I also think that as Covid released its vise-like grip over the past 18 or so months, getting out more became more possible and the joy of seeing actual humans again was again available.

Nonetheless, I’m blogging now. And I’m choosing to blog on this topic (see Subject Line above) because I’ve written two emails — well, an email and then an online post — recently that dealt directly with this issue of conflict in our society, and that was my indication that these thoughts are clearly on my mind right now. I know that they’ve been on my mind for a while (say since 2016 at least), but we are again in a national election year, and the frightening prospect of losing our liberty to a bunch of thugs is very scary. The American experiment is better than that.

Here are the two exchanges, which I will quote verbatim instead of trying to rehash in some kind of digest.

Exchange #1 — An email exchange with Sarah Whiting, dean of the Harvard Graudate School of Design, upon the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of the university.

In a public blast email dated January 8, 2024, Whiting wrote the following:

Dear GSD Community,

I echo many of the points in Alan Garber’s message from this afternoon, which I encourage everyone to read [full text is below]. I share his admiration for Claudine Gay’s leadership and service, and his confidence in the Harvard community persevering through these unsettling times. While this is an unprecedented and difficult moment for all of us, Alan’s note is a good reminder as to why we are all part of the GSD. We have a shared commitment to moving forward design, planning, policy, and knowledge more broadly.

Here on campus, I have long implored all of us to slow down, listen, and take care not to be swept up in the temporal roller coaster that today’s social media–dominated culture tries to impose on our world. Resisting the flurry and fury of immediacy will be ever more challenging throughout this election year, but I am committed to finding ways for everyone at the School to maintain our focus, our attention, our values, and our collective ambitions for a better world.

In community,

Sarah

Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

To her blanket email, I responded to no one in particular (and not even expecting my email to be read by anyone but a chatbot somewhere):

I agree with Sarah Whiting’s sentiments wholeheartedly and I wish her luck in fostering an environment that supports her reasoned approach and understanding of these very difficult times we find ourselves in. 

To this rather banal statement of my support for her, she — or her assistant — took the time to say this fairly anodyne thank you:

Dear Sam,

It’s so thoughtful of you to take the time to write to me! I appreciate your thoughts and am grateful for the support. The GSD is fortunate to have such a thoughtful and engaged alumni community.

I wish you all the best for the year ahead.

Kind regards,

Sarah

Needless to say, I was rather thrilled to receive any response, and found myself standing at a bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge typing intensely on my phone:

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for taking time to reply. 

These are mad times.

As I reflect on our current insanity, I am painfully aware that sometimes the moderate approach is really also a culprit - the status quo approach supporting those systems in power that got us into this mess in the first place. 

Instead, it’s really our profound incapacity to be civil or civilized to one another that I find so shocking and depressing. What role design and planning (my background) play in all this, I know not. 

That we are always quoting Shakespeare, I know for certain. At every offense or slight we “‘Cry havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war!”

I’m personally more in the John Lennon camp. Give Peace a Chance. 

Good luck with your work and help lead us through these challenging times. 

Sam

Exchange #2 — a brief dialog with Craig Kelley in response to a video post I put up on unPlanned marking the new year, and noting that I need to make some changes to the video format, to up its game a little bit.

Craig, an old friend and a long-time Cambridge City Councillor, wrote this:

Add some conflict. There is no way that Cities are about people always being pleasant and agreeable to each other. Bike lanes are horribly dangerous for bikers. The people who promote them live in a fantasy land where, somehow, using rare earth minerals and fossil fuels to move a machine with pedals somehow makes them cyclists. Lots of crazies out there. Bring a few different varieties to your show and see the sparks fly.

To which I responded this:

Agreed, there's plenty of conflict in cities. The phrase "Good fences make good neighbors" wasn't coined from zero human experience. In that sense cities are our best examples of how we can find ways of working through our problems with each other. One of the reasons I don't focus on the conflicts is that there are already plenty of forums where that's the main meal, and there are plenty of people in the public eye who stoke conflict to exploit it for their own cynical ends. I'm not interested in producing more of that. Our public discourse is already strained to the breaking point with that stuff. That said, I need to do a better job of exploring and explaining the trade-offs (and the conflicts) inherent in the urban issues that confront us all. "To explore and inform." There, a goal for 2024.

I’m not sure what any or all of this says about the issue of conflict in our society or about me as a person, but I clearly have it on the brain, and so this blog seemed like a good place to share it.

Summer schedule

I got on a summer schedule by mistake, and that means that the pace of the videos has slowed a bit. But I think the quality is good, and hopefully getting better. Here are some things on my list …

I still need to blog about my conversation with Kairos Shen and Francine Houben about the Bolling Building in Boston. That was a simply fascinating discussion about urban dynamics, politics and planning (and architecture) all wrapped up into one.

Meanwhile, my most recent conversation is a tour of Cambridge’s watershed with Dave Kaplan of the Cambridge Water Department. That needs its own blog too. Look for that upcoming.

Boston in Transit

This week, we post our conversation with Steven Beaucher, the proprietor of WardMaps on Massachusetts Avenue. We talk about his new book, Boston in Transit — this veritable encyclopedia of facts about transit in Boston.

Boston — by which we mean Boston and the entire Boston region — is wonderful for so many reasons. It holds a place of primacy for being the first at so much. I was reading yesterday that the first English to row up the Charles River and disembark at what later became known as Harvard Square created the first town plan in British North America when they laid out where houses would be building. The year was 1630.

Likewise with transit, the first public transit in the new world was a ferry boat — really a large canoe that could carry people — that ran from Charlestown to Boston. The ferry was required because although the first settlement happened on the Charlestown peninsula, some in the group decided to head south one peninsula to the Shawmut (soon renamed Boston) for better water. From there transit continued through the centuries into the Industrial Age and the nation’s first subway running under Tremont Street in Boston — originally traveling only one stop from Park Street to Boylston Street.

Steven states that he wanted to fill the gap he found in the documentary sources about the T. There was no “one stop shop” for information about the history of the whole endeavor, and he sat down to write his book and self-publish it to create that unified resource.

We also spend some time talking about the current T map — the one created by Cambridge Seven Architects in the mid-1960s. The history of transit maps has always had a fascination for me, because the connection between a transit system and the mapping of a transit system are — it occurs to me — inextricably linked.

Stamps in the Time of Covid

Of all my conversations on unPlanned, I have found my conversation with David Luberoff the most beguiling. David tells us about how he planned to write about a series of letters that his father sent to his mother when he was a young G.I. in Europe during the Second World War, but when he actually sat down to do this, he was diverted for some unknown reason to his father’s stamp collection instead and found himself writing a post on Facebook every day about a different stamp from his father’s stamp collection. It all started in April of last year, at the start of Covid, and what began as a whim developed into a full-scale project, one that continued up until this April, when he finished up his writing by ending on his father’s birthday. A full year of writing. A full year of learning about stamps. A full year spent with his now deceased father, perusing this collection that was an obsession of a man decades ago, that ended up on shelf, and then was bequeathed to the son long after the father was gone.

It’s David’s reflection not only on his father’s life, but also on his own life and then as well on all the historical markers that are commemorated in these stamps, it is this that I find so beguiling.

It is also perhaps that David and I share a New York connection, so his reminiscing about the 1969 Mets in relation to a stamp about the 1964 World’s Fair, these all have some meaning to me. Or his remembering driving across the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge with his mother, a memory sparked by stamp honoring the bridge.

Also, he spends a lot of time thinking about public monuments, a subject that also fascinates me. He does so in relation to stamps commemorating Confederate soldiers, which is so timely in this year of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Derek Chauvin.

It is also that ever-human sense about “a world gone by.” Stamp collecting is not what it was. As David points out, FDR was a passionate stamp collector. Hard to imagine a president, any president nowadays, having that same hobby. There’s just too much else to distract. As I write this, for example, I am processing a video on my other computer while listening to the Doors on YouTube. The Doors, btw, make it into one of David’s posts.

I find myself returning to my conversation with David again and again in my mind — one of those quirky events that in some ways isn’t about anything, but in other ways is about everything, life itself.

Food Retail

I’ve just finished posting the interview with Steven Darwin, the proprietor and — as he assiduously points out — the co-founder of Darwin’s Ltd in Cambridge.

Steven is a wonderful interviewee because he just goes with it. He has lots and lots of stories from the past, but he has lots and lots of thoughts about the present (and the future).

I found it quite wonderful to remember the world of 1993 when he first opened Darwin’s. It was the onset of the Era of the Cappucino, but only just. The Boston Globe still arrived in the morning on your doorstep in paper, not out of electrons, and the neighborhood along Mt. Auburn Street, while wealthy 28 years ago was nowhere near its modern-day lavish cousin.

And most importantly, Steven talks of the “reset” that Covid offered. In our talk, I quote David Luberoff when he said that this past year brought Dante to his mind because we’ve been through a hell unquestionably, but also a purgatory. And there’s been a bit of heaven in this year too. A time to pause. A time to reexamine and reevaluate who we are and what we’re doing.

It was a great conversation with Steven. Let’s see if we can begin to work on the issues of ground floor retail and property taxes that he raises.

Community Engagement during Covid

Emily Torres-Cullinane and Carolina Prieto take us into the world of community engagement, one of the crucial tools of all urban planners. How could it be successfully accomplished in the era of Covid, when large group meetings were no longer allowed? How can a large group work online?

It’s hard to remember now, but one year ago, there was no consensus on what online tools were going to be the best. Zoom ended up winning that competition by being the most user-friendly with the lowest bar to entry. That was the tech challenge. The bigger challenge still loomed — how to make a real translation from in-person to connection to online connection. I think we’re still learning the rules of that road.

A thought that really resonates with me: Emily notes that we’re not the same people we were one year ago. Covid has changed us significantly. We won’t return to the way we did community engagement before. We’re going to take the tools we learned and developed in the online world and use them post-Covid. I am continually fascinated by the question of just how much we'll carry forward into the non-Covid world post-pandemic. I’m not altogether convinced that we won’t forget a lot of the most profound lessons we’ve learned from this experience.

Emily also introduces the concept of “civic infrastructure,” the human infrastructure in a community that allows them to problem-solve. The digital divide emerges in this conversation too, and Carolina talks of the digital access plan that MAPC is working on with Chelsea, Revere and Everett MA.

Finally, Emily and Carolina recently returned from SXSW to think about tech and planning, Topics such as AI and the ethics around it, and questions around the hybrid version of community meetings all emerge, in part because the entertainment world is thinking about how to connect in-person and virtual in the live music setting. What can planners steal from that space and apply to their world of community engagement?

The whole conversation illuminates just how much we’ve changed during this year.

Economic Recovery post-Covid

Betsy Cowan Neptune of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council visited unPlanned to talk about economic recovery in the Boston region as we slowly escape the grip of Covid. Betsy is a woman who knows so much about economic development, having worked at the city of Boston before joining MAPC and thinking regionally about the problem. She just shepherded the Comprehensive Economic Development Study (CEDS) through the process.

Perhaps the most interesting point (of the many interesting points she raises) is that the CEDS study was underway when Covid hit. If anything could overturn someone’s assumptions about what constitutes economic development, it is a global pandemic that basically shuts down all economic activity for a while. My contention about Covid is that it exposed all the systems we have created — both explicitly created and implicitly created — and laid bare what works and what doesn’t work in our system. Betsy and her team had to grapple with all of that, and more. Issues of generational wealth creation, and not just sustaining, issues of Main Street revitalization and the related issues of regulation. And of course the huge wealth gaps that exist by race and ethnicity.

Betsy’s interview has gotten plenty of response, which is an indication of just how many people are focused on these crucial questions.

Cities and Film, a conversation with Ezra Glenn

Ezra Glenn walks us across the intersection of cities and film, just like he does in his MIT class called The City in Film.

In our conversation, we talk about Berlin: Symphony of a Great City which is a fascinating 1927 film. Ezra points out that the earliest films were is many ways the most experimental — no one had really figured out what a film was supposed to be, so directors were willing to experiment with all sorts of ideas. As filmmaking advanced, many of the wilder innovations were dropped for the sake of efficient storytelling. Nevertheless, the idea of a city as a symphony is apt, and this movie gives a real snapshot of the life of one of the world’s great cities before the Nazi regime and the World War II left it completely in ruins.

We also talk about Jules Dassin’s The Naked City which is considered one of the great and first “city movies” ever. [I remember there are some wonderful street scenes from The House on 92nd Street, a Henry Hathaway classic from 1945.] Ezra corrects us: it’s not film noir, it’s really the first police procedural, which he says is fitting given its 1948 date, at the outset of the decade of the bureaucratic man. I note that New York is itself a character in the movie. When I first saw this film way back in graduate school, I was told it was the first movie to film live street scenes, which they achieved by hiding the camera in the back of a delivery van.

When Craig Kelley saw this interview, he noted with approval Ezra’s comment that he had switched from being a city planner to focusing on urban studies: “Stop rushing to change cities and be a little more reflective and try to spend a some time thinking about what cities are in the first place.”

Innovation Economy. The new book by Scott Kirsner.

Scott Kirsner is a natural storyteller. His new book, Innovation Economy, compiles so much of his writing into one place, covering his two-decades long view of the changing economy of Cambridge and Boston. Of all his tales, my favorites are the quirkier ones — Mark Zuckerberg having a coffee at Henrietta’s Table at the Charles Hotel, trying to get funding for this new Harvard project called thefacebook, or the old frat house at Dartmouth College that served as the basis of the 1978 film Animal House. If you’re of a certain generation (I am), that movie was a wonderful encapsulation of the absurdity of that era. It’s not surprising to learn the home of “Toga, Toga, Toga” is now a shared workspace for tech entrepreneurs. If that doesn’t encapsulate the last 40 years of educated America, I don’t know what does. But Kirsner also shares his observations about some other changes that are more vexing — How should we think of gig workers? What will happen to the urban office real estate market post-Covid? And back to Mark Zuckerberg for a moment — How in the world did a Harvard College dropout create a company that 15 years later would be worth approximately $720 billion? As Kirsner points out, when Zuckerberg first approached local venture capital firms, the model was to fire all these “kids” and replace them with “responsible adults.” Imagine if that had happened!

Tim Rowe changes the world with each endeavor

Last week, we talked with Tim Rowe about his newest endeavor, CIC Health. He tells the backstory of how it came to be,

Tim Rowe is one of those people you should never underestimate. He thinks big about all of his challenges, and CIC Health is no exception. Its earliest days were an effort to get testing to the many people who occupy CIC’s office space — it is very hard to fill an office — especially when it is shared office space — if there is a airborne viral pandemic happening. From that earliest foray into testing, CIC Health was asked to expand beyond their own walls and test people on the outside. From there, vaccination sites made sense, and with Tim, it’s never a small endeavor.

I don’t know if it’s correct to call Tim “Zelig-like.” I mean it as a compliment and it should be understood as such in this context. His footprint on the Boston area will be felt long after he departs the scene. From his path-breaking start with the Cambridge Innovation Center, to his role in creating District Hall in the Seaport District of Boston to CIC Health, he has participated in some of the most impressive endeavors of the past two decades in this 400 year old city.

We took the first part of the interview to talk about CIC itself, because it is so world-changing all by itself. Shared workspaces have been hit hard by Covid, but it is reasonable to assume they will be back and their impact on the urban office market has not yet fully been felt, I think it’s fair to say that.

I appreciated his willingness to come onto unPlanned, and we hope to have him back some other time.

Cities of Difference

I realize that I hadn’t blogged about last week’s conversation with Julian Agyeman, professor at Tufts. As always, Julian presents fascinating ideas and provocative concepts by which to understand our world. There is so much in what he talks about, it’s hard to focus in on just a couple of concepts, but nevertheless here goes …

“Urban planning is the spatial toolkit of white supremacy,” is where we start in this conversation. Food justice — and food injustice more accurately — is a result of a centuries of racist planning. The overall goal is to have just and sustainable cities. From these opening thoughts, Julian walks us into many of the conversations that spin out from there.

“We cannot dissociate the way we’ve planned our cities from the way we police our cities ….” The overall concept of policing public spaces contains so much. The differential between how police address people of color and how they address whites has been part of our national conversation for a while now, but the additional angle that most of these interactions happen in public spaces is at once obvious but also thought provoking, particular when Julian directs the conversation to Minneapolis, the epicenter of our racial dialog over the past year. Whether it’s a street, a playground, a public park or any of the many other public spaces that we all share, how people are treated in them differs wildly. Again, this is an obvious point, but I can’t help but feel there’s a lot there for planners to digest.

I called the episode “Cities of Difference,” from his own phrase in which he describes our cities as places where a multitude of cultures meet. He views harshly the lack of cultural competency in planning schools and he advocates for “deep enthnographic” understandings of our communities, whether it’s in police departments, planning departments or in our non-profits. He cities Benjamin Barber of CUNY and his book If Mayors Ruled the World in response to my question if we have re-entered into a world of the city-state where cities — global, international, multi-ethnic — sit atop the political pyramid.

Finally, he talks about mayors in general and Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, in specific. He calls him a juggler, balancing between the unions, the developers and concerned citizens. He says most mayors are. What they often lack is vision — unlike some Central and South American mayors. He puts in a plug for Michelle Wu, herself a candidate for Boston’s mayor, as he has done some policy work with her.

I am so grateful that Julian joined us on unPlanned. His breadth of thinking and his passionate commitment to a more just and sustainable world, are found in his every word.

Housing ain’t easy

In this episode of unPlanned, we talk with Sean Hope of Hope Real Estate and Jesse Kanson-Benanav of B’nai B’rith Housing about their experiences as affordable housing developers. Both have connections to Cambridge, MA. Sean grew up here and Jesse lived in Cambridge for many years before getting priced out by the expensive housing market. They both share their candid assessment of the difficulties of doing projects in this progressive city, where all good ideas run into inevitable neighborhood opposition. Jesse also takes us out to the suburbs in his examination of projects both in West Roxbury and in Sudbury.

We also hear about their concerns over the role that Baby Boomers play in such communities. Boomers were once radicals determined to upend the status quo, but in the eyes of younger generations, they now represent the status quo — older, well-heeled and well-housed, comfortable in their surroundings and averse to change. It adds a layer of irony to the discussions.

From another angle, we at unPlanned have avoided the topic of housing until now. Few issues are more emotionally charged than this one. Everyone understands that having a roof over one’s head is a basic human need, but at the same time change for anyone is hard, and new housing means changes in the neighborhood. Also, as Burt Bacharach once wrote, “a house is not a home,” by which he meant that the physical structure of housing does not in and of itself make it a home. That requires people, and connections and emotions and memories. Our connection to our housing is a big part of our identity.

I hope to have these two guys back on to talk about their statewide advocacy work they’ve done.

Planning for Boston

In last week’s episode, we learned about MetroCommon 2050, the regional plan for Boston that is currently underway at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. We had Sarah Philbrick from their staff walk us through the many issues involved in pulling together such a complex endeavor as a regional plan that tries to look into the future 30 years.

Planning for unknowns is always hard. It’s one thing to plan for a rail expansion that has already been funded and will begin construction in 18 months and take 3 years to complete, but it is quite something else to try to imagine an unforeseen event like the 9/11 attacks, or a plague such as Covid-19, both of which will fundamentally reshape our behaviors and our systems in ways we still struggle to understand.

More generally, it’s just very hard to imagine the future, especially the future of a region 30 years from now. One way to help people develop a picture of what the world might look like in three decades is to look backwards three decades. What did 1990 Boston look like? For those of us old enough, we can conjure up an image of that city then, photographs and movies can help, and that experience opens a door to the world of 30 years hence.

Talking Detroit in the new year

[I am happy to start this blog, which will be reflect on the work of unPlanned and the episodes we are creating.]

As we kick off 2021, I could not be more happy to begin the discussion with Ned Staebler of Wayne State University about the Motor City. He offers his insight into one of the most fascinating instances of urbanity in North America. Between its huge growth in the first half of the 20th century and then its near collapse in the second half, in so many ways, it represents all of America expansion and retreat over the course of the “American Century.” On a more personal note, I especially like the moment of the conversation where we discuss the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Art, a room Ned calls “the Sistine Chapel of industry.”