With that in mind, if you are on Twitter, I invite you to post one or many tweets on the question:

How does Twitter help you as a planner?
What do you think planners or planning should know about Twitter?

Let’s get a conversation going using the hashtag #plannerstweet!

Why are you interested?

My research for my master’s thesis is examining how organizations have used and understand Twitter for public engagement on sustainability issues, so I’m interested in how planners see Twitter and how they carry these perceptions into their work! I have some more information on my research available in this blog post about my research.

More personally, I have been using Twitter since before I became a student of planning, and arguably it has been a pretty important part of how I learn about planning best practice and the many perspectives people bring to questions about the future of cities, and I think it is changing the way people form and understand community in ways that are relevant to planning.

How will you be using what you hear?

I’ve gotten a lot of advice from people I’ve talked to about my research to use Twitter itself to engage people in conversation about my research, and figured now, while I’m fairly early in the research process, is as good a time as any to let people know what questions I’m asking and how I’m thinking of answering them.

On February 2, I will be giving a presentation at the Canadian Association of Planning Students conference on February 2, 2012, entitled “Twitter for community and engagement.” I’ll be presenting some initial key ideas about how I’ll be conducting this research to fellow students (each with their own interests, opinions and experiences with both planning, social media and technology generally), and I will also do a summary of what’s been said about planners tweeting. I’ll make that presentation file available once the conference has ended as well.

This is pretty new for me and I’m looking forward to learning whatever I can from it. With any hope, the people I’ve been talking to and following who talk about planning, feel like weighing in on this!

This also seems like a good time to ask — the Transportation Research Board just held their annual meeting just wrapped up in Washington, D.C. (where I learned a lot just by following along on Twitter with the #trbam tag), where many were enthusiastically tweeting and pulling others to join in the digital backchannel.

Finally…, However you use Twitter is relevant. Although my personal interest is public engagement, planners do a lot of things that aren’t public engagement that are potentially impacted by Twitter and social media too. Whether it’s following along conference (like I do, a lot), keeping in touch with those people you connected with but are far away from, or just keeping an ear to the ground on who else is talking about what is going on in places that matter to you, it’s all fair game. Sky’s the limit. (Anyway, this is Twitter, I couldn’t stop you if I tried.)

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on using Twitter!

#myresearch looks at how planning orgs have used & understand Twitter for public engagement on sustainability issues.

Why does Twitter matter for planning?

I’ve asked this question for a pretty good long while, as a consequence of not only using Twitter as I was learning about transit and planning, but also helping instigate Transit Camp (in 2007), learning about transit advocacy through the Vancouver Public Space Network (2009), reading bloggers and those familiar with planning (like Stephen Rees, Robert Goodspeed, Richard Layman, and countless others now that urban issues are enjoying a lot of attention — not to mention, the crew on Tumblr), and just tweeting what I was seeing and why I care about the experience of transit. I’ve previously spoken about this research at Barcamp a few years back, when I was just starting in the planning program.

As I’ve gone through planning school, I realized that I think planners are generally an awesome, fascinating and thoughtful bunch. But focusing solely on what they do or don’t do with technology wasn’t really squaring well with my interests in the social impacts of technology broadly. Planners think about technology through the lens of planning as work — so planners tend to use the frame “planning support software.” Planning is complex work, and technology helps them do many parts of it in more expedient, effective ways; so there’s a rich body of work around the use of different technologies (like PPGIS) for engaging the public on planning issues. But the approaches are generally still focused on practice — not on understanding how the lifeworld of the people engaged in using Twitter might help us reconsider public engagement.

For the most part, I operate on the assumption that citizens don’t see planning the way planners see it (by necessity). When the public talks about things that are relevant to urban planning on Twitter, they may or may not be variously interested in venting, gallows humour, letting off steam, sharing anecdotes, or getting to the point of becoming activists, advocates, and wanting to have some say in shaping the places that mean something to them. There’s maybe also some daring to hope, sometimes, that when we tell our story, that we’re not only coping through telling, but also hoping that something of our day-to-day experience could have some impact on decisions about what comes next.

Moreover, for those of us using social media regularly and integrating it with our offline lives (yes, it’s a false, long-standing dichotomy), it exposes us to multiple perspectives of the systems that we both participate in and are constrained by — be they social, economic, cultural, physical or otherwise. The affective dimension of the experience (which others have written very richly and persuasively about) is something we’re more able and (I argue) more compelled to voice and connect on, now, in ways that involved significant logistical challenges previously. This has potential for planning, but it’s not immediately obvious and there are plenty of challenges involved for the planner that wants to meaningfully involve Twitter in official work.

Twitter conversations about transit is a rich example of how tweeting — something pretty small and self-interested as far as doing things goes — might be interpreted as something bigger, more impactful and significant. To what extent are those persons working in and making decisions about transit¹, seeing or understanding what this means to citizens (or being prevented, in various ways, from doing so), and what it could mean for their work? And what does this have to tell about how we talk about all issues related to sustainability, more generally, beyond transit? Those two questions, in a nutshell, are driving my thesis.

…and why Twitter?

On a somewhat practical level, there’s the simple fact that Twitter is slightly easier to work with than Facebook (there is some criticism of that, and I’ll grant it as a limitation). But on the other, there is, I think, a bit more of a sense of public-ness to Twitter. If you are posting publicly, using hashtags, and using Twitter in a way that nurtures any kind of notion of a public self, you will get people you don’t know messaging you, even if it’s just spam. Not everyone reacts well to it. (See StealthMountain, a cheeky Twitterbot provoking people with spelling corrections and auto-favoriting the snarky results.) That’s always been the exciting part of Twitter to me — that you get mentioned or retweeted (and sometimes, minsterpreted) by people who don’t know where you are coming from, and who are genuinely seeing what you say through their slice of experience, their interests, their bias. And as jarring as that is to experience sometimes, to feel that 140 character like a brick wall in your throat, some hope always persists that the conversation might turn into meaningful connecting.

I contrast that with my very recent experiences with Facebook, where I see in my News Feed my friends commenting on their friends posts — yet I’m not able to weigh in on the thread due to the original poster’s privacy settings. That drives me bonkers, frankly, to the point where I consider changing my settings so that I can’t see posts that I can’t myself comment on. It’s not all butterflies and roses on Twitter — I’ve broken some etiquette on responding to private accounts with my public account — but there is a feeling that it’s a semi-regular occurrence, that it happens, and that it is part of using the tool. The only places Facebook shows me people I don’t know, are in Events and sometimes, very rarely, in groups. (That said, what I find it most valuable for by far is showing me the sides I haven’t seen of the people I do know — and these are often sides that they might not feel so willing to share on Twitter, if they even use it at all.)

Progress

For a really, really long time, I considered but avoided making this topic the focus of my thesis for a whole slew of reasons, some involving how little work there was on it. Circumstances evolved, there are others doing work in this from a planning perspective, and now I’m committed whole hog to doing something interesting with this. I’m hoping to continue blogging the research as it forms beneath my feet (or, as the case may be, beneath my fingers, as I write it).

¹ — And lest you think this is simple, there are a lot of them. Municipal governments, regional transportation bodies, provincial ministries, the federal government, entities doing economic development…all have a stake in what money goes where, to provide mobility for certain people doing different stuff.

I’m feeling a renewed interest to doing so. I’m blogging right now from Vancouver ChangeCamp, at the Hive co-working space here. It’s a grey and rainy day here in Vancouver, and the rooms are abuzz with conversations about all sorts of possible changes; and Colleen is across town speaking at TEDxSFU.

I think about the people who I’ve seen spoiling public processes online. I think about the discussions I’ve helped facilitate where people feel the need to assert their opinion in a group situation (either on- or off-line), often at the expense of others’ patience. They are viewed as droning, or being unconstructive or inarticulate, or, in Internet spaces, they are being trolls, and depending on the conversation venue, they are voted down, tuned out, ignored or harassed for what they say.

Does anonymity breed contempt? I find it interesting that lots of contempt gets thrown at City Council during public hearings, where a person’s relative anonymity may vary. I see Colleen’s point, that your credibility as a citizen contributing to a public forum has everything to do with whether you are willing to put your name and face to your opinions — or, as she put it, “people are less likely to act out if they are themselves.” As I identified in my previous post on this topic, however, I feel like that speaks too much from a privileged position — it assumes that “being ourselves” is better than otherwise, and I don’t think that’s a one-to-one equivalence. This was really driven home for me in conversation with April Smith. As a resident of the downtown eastside, she operates in an entirely different systems, where reputation and anonymity have a very specific reference to her physical world, and everything to do with her personal safety, her ability to do and be what she wants.

I think danah boyd‘s recent comments about privacy online to the Wall Street Journal were really insightful about helping us sort this out. Specifically:

[...] privacy is not simply the control of information. Rather, privacy is the ability to assert control over a social situation. This requires that people have agency in their environment and that they are able to understand any given social situation so as to adjust how they present themselves and determine what information they share. Privacy violations occur when people have their agency undermined or lack relevant information in a social setting that’s needed to act or adjust accordingly.

In sum, I don’t think it should be taken lightly that sharing one’s location as a requirement for entry might pose a barrier. At very least, it’s a process that involves trust, and I don’t see much exploration into how to earn that trust, only that having faith that the trust won’t be betrayed is a price of admission into the discussion space.

Image borrowed from the Buzzer Blog. When was the last time you rode a Vancouver bus this empty in the daytime?

Last week, TransLink announced that they are running a contest/campaign on their Facebook page involving riders’ pet peeves in transit. They are encouraging people to people to vote, elimination-style, on the behaviors observed on transit that people find most irritating. The incentives to do so, aside from that wonderful feeling of having gotten your feelings off your chest, are a boat of prizes ranging from branded swag to a new iPhone 4S.

With all due respect to the staff at TransLink — many of whom I know to varying degrees, have interacted with a bunch, think highly of and sympathize with in the nature of their work — this contest leaves a very, very bad taste in my mouth as a person committed to nurturing community and a culture of support for public transportation. It reflects an unsophisticated and unenlightened approach to the question of how to encourage civility, and my hope is this post will shed some light on how it could have been done differently, as many others have also noted in comments on TransLink’s blog.

To be fair, TransLink’s contest does a couple of things.

• It reminds us of “the rules,” pointing out what it means to be good neighbours, good citizens, good travel companions, in respecting the space and experience of others. Nothing wrong with that.
• It encourages us to attempt to find some humour in these situations, through the use of cartons satirizing the behaviours they are trying to draw attention to, like listening to one’s music too loud, putting bags on seats, or — heaven forbid — offending someone’s olfactory sense. Ok, nothing terribly wrong with that either.

But as someone concerned with engagement for sustainable urban transportation, who makes a point of tracking the impressions and emotional narratives around transit, I want to draw attention to what else this contest is doing in the course of achieving these objectives.

This campaign encourages us to give voice to our sense of indignance around the experiences we have about transit that are specifically caused by other riders. This essentially encourages us to accept the belief that it is the presence of other people that makes public transit undignified.

I find this highly problematic on two levels. First, it deals a blow in the attempt to frame transit as an equally good, if not better, transportation option compared to the car, with its climate control, pricy isolation and image of rugged independence. Secondly, it is giving institutional support to the use of humour as a corrective for frustration in the social experience of transit. Instead of seeking to encourage compassion for those we share transit spaces with who may have genuine and legitimate reasons for acting the way that they do, dialogue, or civil discourse, this contest feeds our sense of self-righteousness.

Are the sentiments nurtured by this contest going to encourage people who find these behaviours problematic (which may range from everybody to nobody depending on the actual circumstances) to politely engage people in understanding the external impact of what they do? Maybe. A much more likely scenario, is that it will provoke altercations and conflicts between those feel they are in the ‘right’ (they have the rules on their side), and those who may be somewhere on the spectrum between being deliberate jerks, and experiencing what constitutes their life on transit. Mothers feed their children on transit. People who take transit may be time-poor, working multiple part-time jobs having to multi-task not out of choice but necessity. Binners bring their bags of cans and bottles on transit. And as unsavory as it is to think about (and one commenter’s story shows), public transit may at times even be a public health vector. (Just ask Hong Kong.) And yes, people with a wide range of challenges and differing abilities also take transit.

Some blogs have the concept of TransLink’s contest baked right into their DNA. Commuter Contempt (albeit it is based in the US) already illustrates that some of us might only half a beat away from full-on Transit Rage. While the contest’s humourous illustrations and prizes may keep things light-hearted, what’s to stop people who don’t like people on transit to re-direct their rage towards transit itself? Or other people whose use causes perceived “inconvenience” to other transit riders, like the elderly? This contest encourages riders to identify as “victims” of others’ non-conformity and appears to give “justice” to the victims, rather than encouraging people to use situations of conflict as a teaching opportunity for dialogue on the challenges of sharing space.

I think humour definitely, certainly has a place. Humor is fantastic and necessary and human and builds incredible bridges — when it is used correctly. Not to ostracize, scapegoat, or to make us feel good about ourselves at the expense of some categorically defined other. Chances are those others are actual, real people — and they may take some offense to being treated as the butts of an agency-sanctioned joke if someone they are sharing space with is self-righteously attempting to assert power over them.

From the Buzzer Blog. Does that mother look like she modelling respectful, assertive communication to you? Maybe that lizard just got off a double shift and has already missed their stop.

I can definitely see how this emerged from TransLink’s best intentions. “Maximize participation with incentives! Repackage it into a lighter hearted, humourous affair! Get some gallows humour out of joking about a race to the bottom of transit unpleasantness, and get it on people’s radar in an unconventional way. Asking people politely like every other government entity does is boring and going to get us ignored — so let’s doing something more offbeat!”

I’ll even allow that my particular disposition, occasional moments of policy wonkiness, and specific interest in transit puts me squarely outside the target audience for this campaign. As I’ve tried to illustrate above, I’m by no means disagreeing with the general thrust of TransLink’s intentions — after all, as a transit rider, I would personally benefit from having people taking better care of transit facilities and being more considerate of others in the space.

But is this contest the way to encourage riders to be communicative, assertive, compassionate and mindful in negotiating conflicts in space while using transit — or the larger project of building a base of citizens with whom to advocate for the resources necessary to have better services and world-class transit? In my view, absolutely not.

(And for the record, my biggest pet peeve is people who use nail clippers on the bus.)

See also:

• Buzzer Blog editor Robert Willis addresses some of the critiques posed by Todd Sieling. While I’m at it, I’d also like to echo Todd’s thanks to Rob and others who continue to be responsive and show they are listening online.
• Paper by Tod Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute on Transportation and Social Exclusion.
• Fundamental attribution error — a problem we make not just in choosing to take transit, but approaching the behaviour of others generally.

Complexifiers are averse to reduction. Their instincts are to turn simple assignments into quagmires, and to reject simple ideas until they’re buried (or asphyxiated) in layers of abstraction. […] They take pride in consuming more bandwidth, time, and patience than needed, and expect rewards for it.

Simplifiers thrive on concision. They look for the 6x=6y in the world, and happily turn it into x=y. They never let their ego get in the way of the short path. When you give them seemingly complicated tasks they simplify, consolidate and re-interpret on instinct, naturally seeking the simplest way to achieve what needs to be done. They find ways to communicate complex ideas in simple terms without losing the idea’s essence or power.

Anybody who’s talked to me in person (especially in the past 6 months) will have no trouble whatsoever guessing which of these two groups I identify with.

This reminds me of a really interesting segment of Iain McGilchrist’s RSAnimate talk about our misconceptions about our left and right brains. Specifically, a section when he describes how both brains doing what they do best in parallel for a completely ordinary situation as being evolutionarily beneficial. (The whole video is fantastic, by the way — well worth the eleven minutes.)

I would argue that favouring simplicity at all times is not only overly reductionist, but that the dominance of that worldview — that complexity and people who respect or attend to it are problematic and negative — has led us to our current quandary when it comes to the unsustainability of humanity’s relationship with its natural environment. At root, it comes down to hundreds (if not thousands) of systems, all pursuing isolated definitions of simple, elegant objectives, preferring to eschew the complexity of the whole in favour of washed hands and patted backs. Only those who cannot afford the going market rate for staying out of the messy “details” — like, oh, much of what we don’t price in the economy, such as women and animals — bear the consequences. Until that rapidly becomes everybody.

The way I see it, a disdain for complexity — particularly in the urban planning domain where I grapple with it most often — is wishful thinking. Oh, if only life weren’t path dependent. If only we were able to pursue system optimal without penalty, switching costs, or the messiness of your legacy system. The world I know doesn’t work that way.

Don’t get me wrong. Simplicity is absolutely essential — when the endeavour is at the scale of how we act upon the world, seeing as boiling the ocean has a poor rate of return. Big fan of user-centered design, right here, and that’s (supposedly?) all about not making me think.

Deploy this mindfully, however, when the project at hand is understanding the world in its wicked, interdependent glory. We very soon will be living the limitations of yesterday’s methods, for those of us who aren’t knee-deep in those endgames already. Something tells me the thinking that got us into this isn’t going to be the stuff that gets us out. Maybe those simplifiers would get something out of figuring out how to play nice with those pesky complexifiers after all. (And the converse: that complexifiers get better at articulating their value in ways the simplifiers can grasp, or, at very least, can’t write off completely.)

What I get out of McGilchrist’s video is that we need to be skillful in deploying, and recognize, the roles and necessity of each mode. Berkun’s post neatly demonstrates McGilchrist’s point that the reductionistic brain is very good at being self-consistent and arguing on its own behalf. But it’s not the be-all and end-all. So, more appreciation, less blanket judgment of the complexifiers, capiche?

I will give Berkun credit for thing: he did manage to get me to write a succinct blog post with a clear point.

Jack Mason, an IBMer working on the IBM Smarter Cities Tumblr, wrote a couple weeks ago:

As an IBMer working on Smarter Cities — and a New Yorker for much of my adult life — I’d like to observe that Adam Greenfield doesn’t know me, my motivations, or those of the thousands of colleagues who are dedicated their lives and careers towards the goal of enabling cities, and urban citizens, to become smarter.

Jack Mason later re-blogged his comment on his personal Tumblr which is Disqus-enabled, and further expanded:

Adam: You suggested that businesses that are working on helping cities become smarter are essentially heartless…lacking the love and appreciation of these places that you, presumably, hold. I categorically reject that sweeping, unsupported and contentious assertion. Just as the world is increasingly becoming urbanized, the vast majority of the people in organizations working on intelligent cities have a lifelong relationship with these same places, and a personal, human interest in seeing the cities that they grew up in or call home thrive. Your argument falls right on its face, and that’s why I think people should watch the video and come to their own conclusion on whether your assessment is either fair, accurate or true.

As a former IBMer (16 months at the Toronto IBM Software Development Group) and an unabashed fan of Greenfield’s work and approach to cities, these strongly-worded responses piqued my interest.

Mason was responding to comments Mr. Greenfield made in his talk at the PICNIC conference, entitled, “Another City is Possible.” In the interests of giving full context, I not only watched all of Adam’s talk (available here), I’ve also gone to the trouble of transcribing the section that is summarized in that original blurb, for those of you who are curious but without 25 minutes to spare. It’s a little long but I think it’s very helpful in teasing out the nuance of not only Adam’s point, but the heart of what the IBMer was expressing.

Who are the institutions who are so deeply invested in this rhetoric, who have so much to gain or to lose by ensuring that humanity as an urban species invests in the smart city? If you are in this room, you will probably not be surprised that the institutional players are people like IBM, Cisco, and Siemens. These are people who are in business — not a surprise, in the business of technology. At best they may be system integrators. They might even describe themselves as the missing link between the real estate and technology sectors —this is verbatim, taken from Living PlanIT, the firm building in the Portuguese valley.

I want to make it clear that I’m not faulting these institutions, these enterprises, for being enterprises — they have a role to play in the world, they have a valuable role to play in the world. But I do think it’s interesting and perhaps unfortunate that so much of our urban future is being predicated on the actions and activities of institutions that probably don’t have very much of a sense for design; certainly, as we’ll see, do not have that much of a sense for urbanism, and — I’m going to say this in a very small voice — probably do not love the places they are developing for; probably have never thought about the idea of love, and the idea of a city, and how these things might relate to one other. And my assertion to you is that these things go together very well inindeed as a matter of fact, if you’re thinking about cities in the absence of an affirmative sense of love for the place, you’re probably missing a lot of what makes that city valuable, and most of what makes it a generator of value.

First off, I get what Jack is feeling. As a lifetime inhabitant of Vancouver, one of the most planner-friendly cities out there (evidence: we name streets after them), before I went to planning school and engaged deeply with literature on urbanism, I scoffed at the hoity-toity idea that anyone could tell me anything about the city I grew up in that I didn’t already know, or that the future I desired for my city was rooted in anything less than pure love. Sometimes I still feel that way, even as I realize how rounded my understanding and appreciation of Vancouver has become in the past 2 years.

But I fundamentally think Mr. Greenfield has a point, which I would re-state in the form of the following questions. I don’t do this because I deny the love of New York as place held by Jack or his colleagues. But because it comes back to the first principles and DNA of the organizations in question, not what the individuals in those organizations hold to be central, vital and true.

1. Does IBM (or other organization) respect the spontaneous, the emergent, and the community-driven in addition to the activities and units which constitute the native tongue of the governments with whom IBM and the enterprises like it can most readily identify with?
2. Does IBM (or other organization) prioritize the inclusive aims of design, such as supporting choice and conviviality in the course of everyday life for end-users, ordinary citizens and residents, and lead through a process geared towards that outcome? Have their clients empowered them to prioritize these values in pursuit of their work?

While the answer to these questions will answer the question posed in the title of this blog post, I think it’s instructive to determine whether questions like this were asked at all.

What I’ve come to understand about loving cities is that there are two sides to the sentiment. There is an appreciative definition of love — the awe and recognition of the way the physical characteristics of a place and the spirit of the people doing what they do best just mesh. ¹

But there is also an active definition — to love in the sense of promulgating, furthering, extending, nurturing to self-replicate. It means appreciating the interlocking patterns in ways that support the full diversity of a space’s users, needs and interests. It means to love not only the city that one knows, but the city as defined by those one disagrees with, maybe even those one despises — and to be at very least aware of it in the thick of defining an intervention, as a first crack at anticipating consequences. I don’t think it’s wrong to doubt whether business-oriented interests have the capacity to consider — nay, to love² — a city in this way, and to ask that they should as they shape our experience of urban space.

So the relevant question becomes not whether one loves, but how that love is informing the judgments about what we want in the future city. The data we can gather can tell us how we might make certain changes, but not which are the right changes to make. The history of urban planning is littered with good intentions that have left their mark in our collective space and memory. This is what I heard in Adam Greenfield’s talk.

(You may also be interested in my previous conversation on this blog with the founder of Living PlanIT.)

¹ — OK, so just how obvious is it that I’ve been (slowly) reading “Timeless Way of Building” by Christopher Alexander?

² — For a while I almost forgot that love has been the centre of my practice.

World Usability Day and World Town Planning Day are two events celebrated very close together, in the first week of November. I propose having a joint project or event to lay the groundwork for conversation between urban planners and user experience practitioners, and the insights each can bring for navigating the urban and information landscapes. I’m looking for conveners who want to help me take this from idea to reality in time for 2011’s WUD/WTPD; we’ll be meeting August 23rd, 6pm at SFU Harbour Centre, Room 7021, to figure out what we want to do and what time we’ve all got to do it. If you work in planning or user experience (or both), consider joining us! And please RSVP (Twitter, comment on this post, etc.)

Background

The purpose of World Usability Day and World Town Planning Day are, respectively, to stage events that draw attention to the importance and contribution of each respective profession on our everyday lives. Usability focuses on making the experience of technology less intimidating, pleasant, and appropriate; urban planners guide the creation of physical places the delight us while meeting a broad spectrum of needs. Both tasks are infused with values and assumptions that result in experiences that are welcoming, useful, and supportive in some cases, and haphazard, unattractive, or dysfunctional in others.

With mobile Internet access getting more widespread, and more people than ever in the world living in cities, I see these two professions having way more in common than different. Consider this:

• both user experience designers and urban planners often serve as advocates for users of systems, working closely with other professionals with their own traditions and norms, such as (software or building) developers, architects or business analysts.
• both are empowered to consider the contributions of effective processes to desired outcomes, as well as how those processes become institutionalized in organizational culture and procedure.
• savvy communication and quality of collaboration is central to both fields.

But there are also some important differences — the scope and speed of projects, how explicitly technology tools figure into the process of work, the particularities associated with public sector or government regulation, and how knowledge and learning is disseminated within the body of professional practice.

Why this? Why now?

A glimpse through some recent headlines gives some important context. In the interests of brevity, I’ll touch only on two:

• Apple, a company that revolutionized how we incorporate computing into our lives, briefly had a larger market cap than the world’s largest oil company – a highly symbolic moment when it comes to our collective, shifting relationship with the car.
• In the aftermath of riots that ripped through London, the UK government has floated the idea of shutting down access to social networks in order to keep violence under wraps and to restore social order, recalling the role similar tools played in citizen protests in Egypt and Tunisia earlier this year.

But there are also much more subtle innovations, nascent but promising. Crowdsourced funding for urban improvement projects. Reinvigorating public dialogue. Re-thinking relationships between citizens, government, and life in our communities.

There are plenty of conversations are already happening about the future of technological infrastructure in cities – but people’s rights or values are seldom the primary focus. In order for technology to result in tangible benefit to cities and the world, rather than tools for reinforcing the status quo, this conversation needs to be informed by, if not outright led by, people who live, work and thrive at the interface of people and systems — of information, policy, physical infrastructure, social norms, and the practices of everyday life.

With the World Usability Day theme of Education for Social Change, the interests and skills of urban planners and information professionals are not only intersecting but beginning to compliment each other. We use information to shape our experience of place, and place continues to infuse our lives with meaning we embed back into our personal expression online.

This is the richness of the conversation I wish to start with a WUD/WTPD event. How can we turn everyday moments and interactions in urban space into learning opportunities for positive social change?

As Adam Greenfield put it succinctly in the title of his book (that we’re still waiting patiently for), the city is here for you to use.

Kicking off

I am convening a meeting for volunteers —  planners and user experience professionals — in Vancouver who want to help me get an event for this November’s WUD / WTPD off the ground. It is taking place Tuesday, August 23 at SFU Harbour Centre, Room 7021.

We’ll need lots of help with things like seeking sponsorships, scoping and planning the event, deciding on final deliverables — but we also have a ton of documentation and methods to draw from!

Why volunteer?

• shape something that’s new and never happened before!
• network with people doing great stuff in mobile Internet, urban planning and public space issues around Vancouver!
• develop project management, writing, and collaborate with people who do or build other interesting things!
• contribute to the learning of your peer professionals at either PIBC or VanUE!
• become more familiar with the ideas, people and organizations thinking about and working on the interaction of information and place in urban areas

Not in Vancouver?

Consider doing something along these lines where you are! Check out the World Usability Day website and your local planning professional organization — this list from Wikipedia might be good start. Have fun!

danah boyd writes on the recent Internet debate around Google banning the use of psuedonyms on its new social networking service, Google+. She writes,

Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly.

I’m interested in the implications this has in the planning engagement process. While a tool like PlaceSpeak is rooted in the idea that sharing where you live with authorities lends credence to your input, participation, and sense of belonging-ness, I’d be curious to know what precedent there is for planning participants to not want to be identified. Perhaps in situations where there is a lot of community pressure to maintain solidarity by supporting or rejecting something as a group.

It also begs the question of how and whether online political participation can or should be linked up with the rest of our online lives, and what differentiates the situations in which that linkage is desirable versus undesirable. A few salient statements on this can be found on skud’s post describing who is hurt by a ban on psuedonyms:

“I enjoy being part of a global and open conversation, but I don’t wish for my opinions to offend conservative and religious people I know or am related to. Also I don’t want my husband’s Govt career impacted by his opinionated wife, or for his staff to feel in any way uncomfortable because of my views.”

“I’ve been stalked. I’m a rape survivor. I am a government employee that is prohibited from using my IRL.”

I’m continually fascinated by how we will learn to accord and reconcile our online and offline selves, and how individuals will refigure and subvert the power that institutions exercise on our reputation. It’s pretty much doing away with identity as an obscurity exercise. Meanwhile, participating in planning processes come with their own issues around power — especially in places like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where claims to legitimacy and the desire to help the needy war with vested interests, bureaucratic particularities and many, many people in various states of distress.

As danah has always pointed out, who you are is only inconsequential if it is something you can benefit from, rather than being victimized, or explicitly threatened with loss of autonomy, control or freedom, because of who you are. As this migrates into the real world of people who can start making life hard for me, I wonder at scenarios based off stories I’ve heard from others. For instance, if I decided I pursue some form of activism in my neighbourhood, and it ran counter to the interests of my landlord, would s/he look for ways to evict me, and would their task be made easier because my real name is all over the place?

I’m a big believer that we can adjust our culture to compensate for the potential abuses made possible by these tools. As David Eaves has written in the past,

It will be interesting to witness a world where grandparents have to explain to their grandchildren why they were climate change deniers on their Facebook page. Or why you did, or didn’t join a given political campaign, or protest against a certain cause.

Ultimately, I think all this remembering leads to a more forgiving society, at least in personal and familial relationships, but the world of pundits and bloggers and politicians may become tougher. Those who found themselves very much on the wrong side of history, may have a hard time living it down. The next version of the daily show may await us all. But not saying anything may not be a safe strategy either. Those who have no history, who never said anything at anytime, may not be seen relevant, or worse, could be seen as having no convictions or beliefs.

There is likely to be a ton of anxiety and an adjustment period full of potential pain before that vision can even come close to being realized, if it ever really can. (This recent story on BoingBoing about mug shot online blackmail relates to this as well.)

In short, I see urban planning, particularly as it pertains to engagement and involvement of members of the public, as one interest among a host of others when it comes to sorting out the intricacies of online identity. Given that decision-makers often get a lot out of knowing things about who’s feeding back to them — basic demographics but also income level, origins, occupations, housing tenure history — in order to understand how to weigh what they say, I imagine we’ll start to see some questions around what degrees of disclosure make your word worth it to the person one is talking to.

Last word to danah:

There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.

Highlighting a few of the parts that really got me (emphasis mine):

Human beings don’t always like good nourishment. We seem to love white sugar, and unless we understand why we feel nauseated and disoriented after binging on sweets, we’ll just keep going. People like low-nutrition TV, too. And that shapes the internal, self-regulated editorial culture of news.

[...]

I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. [...I]f I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.

I’ll say off the bat that my views don’t completely mesh with any one political party. I’m not a partisan operative and I never was.

Nagata is touching on something that deeply resonates with my own understanding of politics — a distate for partisan politics and overly-politicized conversations on policy. It permeates and poisons the idea of participation in politics, and what I notice most damagingly, it puts what I feel is the worst foot forward when it comes to modelling the practice of democracy for newcomers to the country. It drives me a little nuts that nuance is constantly sacrificed, but I liken it to a human limit on the precision of collective action, Planck-constant like.

He’s also highlighting another thing that strikes me about those who embrace the concept of the intrapreneur: those who enter into institutions into an attempt to better improve, inform them, re-jig, re-engineer or reform them. My foray into this area is shallow, but my understanding is that one internalizes, deeply, the values and desires of those organizations and institutions, and to steer outcomes and actions by  framing them according to what matters to said institution. It’s strategic and persuasive and requires an unbelievable amount of savvy and patience. And it requires us to compartmentalize what we do: there are those things we get to do that speak to what we truly believe in, the things we want to push forward, and the changes and outcomes we want to see; and the other part that pays rent, keeps the institution rolling along the path its already cut, and doesn’t visibly challenge an institution directly enough to be perceived as a threat.

Nagata responds to this feeling directly at the end of his post as well:

I know I can’t go back to working parallel to the real problems, hiding my opinions and yet somehow hoping that one viewer every night might piece together what I wanted to say. I thought if I paid my dues and worked my way up through the ranks, I could maybe reach a position of enough influence and credibility that I could say what I truly feel. I’ve realized there’s no time to wait.

On a similar note, Sacha graciously responded to a comment I left her on a post she wrote about Embracing her inner Pollyanna. I asked to get her thoughts on how she maintains her can-do attitude, with a blog post called Living in an Imperfect World. Her approach is sound and wise, and is a good reminder not to get caught up in judgments of effectiveness.

It’s prompting me to re-examine my chosen narratives of how change occurs, what the bigger story is for what I contribute, and how who I am fits into all of that — not completely dissimilar to the process Nagata describes for himself next. The closer I get to the institutions, the more intimidating they look as they stretch away from me into the sky.

Much of the time, events or projects for that matter, are touted for their economic development power and prospects, and the result ends up being minimal.

It’s because there isn’t really a plan designed to leverage the event/project in ways that extend beyond the confines of the site.

Places that benefit from major events and the construction of infrastructure do so through robust planning in advance.

[...]  Development is heralded as bringing all kinds of benefits, but without specific programs in place to realize the benefits, it can take decades to see results.

It’s the difference between trickle down expectations and planning and creating the programs and infrastructure necessary to realized linked improvements.

He cites Vancouver’s Olympics as an exemplary case. I agree. My point in this post is that the transition between what is and what might or will be can be a challenging and a potentially lengthy process.

Background: Little Mountain – Riley Park

I grew up near Main Street in the Little Mountain – Riley Park area, around 28th Avenue, and went to school at General Wolfe Elementary. There’s something terribly functional about the particular arrangement of the neighbourhood. I’ve heard people chalk it up to its growth post-WWI, and though I haven’t had a chance to read about it in depth, its position from downtown and walkable feel would seem to out it as cut from the same cloth as other streetcar suburbs.

Main Street is (for being where I grew up) my prototypical walkable neighbourhood corridor, and it’s only gotten better since I first moved to the neighbourhood, and Canada, in 1989 (and even more so since we left for East Vancouver in 1996). It was previously known for its overabundance and clustering of antique furniture stores, which has subsided a bit in the last decade as the vintage and children’s consignment clothing shops, cafés, restaurants and the odd record store have settled in. Trever Boddy had a fantastic article about the difference between Main and Cambie a couple years back exploring how the varying atmospheres of Cambie and Main can be traced back to the land ownership trends and history of each respective streets — all the more appropriate for this point in my life, as I now live closer to Cambie Village as I do Little Mountain, but visit both with equal regularity. It’s an area rich with stories and close to people’s hearts, and you can feel it in the space. The recession has left its mark — the Pharmacy downsized and a couple spaces are empty, but it seems most things on the strip thrive.

The Olympic Legacy: Vancouver Olympic Centre at Hillcrest Park

The Olympics’ contribution to this neighbourhood is the Olympic Centre at Hillcrest Park, sandwiched in between Cambie and Main, between a diagonal chunk that cuts through from as far north as 27th avenue, down to 33rd Avenue. It makes a ton of sense from the Olympics angle — there was a curling centre there previously, near Nat Bailey Stadium. Along with the skating rink and Percy Norman pool at the Riley Park community centre across and slightly south of Hillcrest Park, it works as a “sporting megablock” for the Olympic legacy to be there.

One of my friends from high school works for the Vancouver Public Library and she told me that Hillcrest would also be opening a new library. The current library is on Main Street, sharing a storefront space with the Little Mountain Neighbourhood house just north of 25th Avenue. I have to say, I’m really torn by this — I think it’s fantastic that the Neighbourhood House will (I’m speculating) get an expanded space because it’s really quite minimal at the moment. And the new space will definitely a step up for the library facilities as well.

(A) Hillcrest Park, the location of the new library (closer to the stadium than the Google pin). (B) Main and 25th Ave, the major transit intersection. Note the outlines of buildings shown in grey, indicating the density of retail along Main Street all the way down to 33rd Ave (off the map).

Gah, my Walkable, Complete Neighbourhood!

Thinking about the urban design and transportation perspective of what is there now, however, the new location at Hillcrest suffers from a significant decrease in accessibility. The current library on Main Street is served by an articulated trolley bus that runs on a 10-minute headway and is only a block away from an east-west bus route. This makes dropping a book or a DVD off at the library, at most, 600 meters away from a trip to the pharmacy, the grocery store, and several banks!

The new Hillcrest Library location is much, much less well-connected. It is only accessible by the #33 bus, which has a 15 minute headway (12 during rush hour). It’s a roughly 300 meter walk from the nearest bus stop on Main Street, through three blocks of housing. It remains a reasonable walk away from the elementary school, but is less convenient for children who need to take the bus on Main Street, and has also moved farther away, south and west, from Tupper Secondary School (which, granted, has its own library and is at the bottom of a considerable hill away from Main Street). I’m not really open to the argument that a neighbourhood library is fine without good bus connections — seniors and people with accessibility needs do need to get to libraries too, after all.

What strikes me is that the sports complex and the resultant library were put in a location that’s a little off the street grid. The placement of the library there makes sense from a facilities management perspective given its relationship to the Olympics, but from an urban design perspective, I’m not so convinced when it comes to everyday pedestrian activity as it exists right now.

One thing that makes this slightly-less-bad is that this neighbourhood is set up really well for biking, and people definitely bike — to the farmer’s markets and baseball games at Nat Bailey, just next to the library. The bike share, when it materializes, will likely take the edge off the pain of getting from Main to the Library.

The subtle hand of Someday-Maybe…?

What I am open to is the idea that the area between Main Street and Ontario Street, between 30th and 33rd, will enliven over the years, as the intersection of 33rd Avenue and Main Street is the site of a planned new mixed-income, mixed-use housing/retail development. I imagine the plan is for the housing to have enough density to warrant an increase in frequency for the #33 bus, and to successfully create a secondary walkable cluster in the neighbourhood at Ontario and 33rd (where Ontario is also a north-south bike route) accessible by foot and bike from Main and 25th, the current locus of attention, and perhaps to a lesser degree, Main and 41st, another intersection of bus lines. Only time will tell whether they are successful in that work.

Got the goods; temporary awkwardness ensues

New libraries and new swimming pools and skating rinks don’t come cheap, so all-in-all, still a major win for a Vancouver. The plan will prove well-conceived only if the pieces — the transit, the housing, the pedestrian realm and retail to give reasons to walk off Main Street — are all able to come together. I think my skepticism is simply rooted in whether messing up something that currently, demonstrably works in the hope of creating something that won’t really work for at least another 5 years, is a worthwhile planning philosophy. It’s a shame the VPL couldn’t keep the Riley Park library open until the Little Mountain housing residents are actually there to properly use that facility.

Awkward for now. Facilities yay. All in the plan.