Looking at planning from both sides now

The lyrics from the Joni Mitchell song "Both sides now" don't really capture my experiences working now as a planner in a suburban county in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Her lyrics are sad and focus on the negatives. I could do that, but it wouldn't accomplish much in the way of bringing about change and improvement.

As much as I write in a hard core fashion, in person, I am very much focused on connections, linkages, integration, and synthesis--figuring out how things are (not) working, the current structure, and then within that structure, trying to figure out how to create and move forward a different path, to yield different and more desirable outcomes.

(Still, I will occasionally get in peoples' faces when their hypocrisy is so evident that I can't stand it. That has to be about 70%--one of the last times I spoke out vociferously was when Scott Bolden, the lawyer for the most ethically challenged of the well connected Growth Machine elite in DC, was speaking at a neighborhood association when he was running for office, about how he could help communities deal with developers. I said, yep, your tenure as the chair of the DC Chamber of Commerce and all your legal dealings really prepared you for that...)

Last night was the first citizen workshop, and we had close to 40 people on a night with great weather, and because of the accelerated nature of the entire planning process, we didn't really do as much advance publicity as I would wished. (You can never do too much.)

So at the end, two older women were talking to me, and they were lamenting how a few years ago, the County had a number of "walkable community" workshops in various parts of the county, but that "nothing had resulted" from the effort. They asked me why this process would be any different.

I countered about looking at the issue on a much longer time frame. That Baltimore County is suburban and very much automobile-centric, and while those previous walkable community charrettes maybe didn't result in actual changes afterwards, in my opinion they were key on laying the foundation of beginning to think differently about mobility within the County, that walking especially and biking somewhat is in fact important and needs to be addressed--and that's at many levels, not just a matter of the choices by elected officials and agencies--citizens also need to recognize that the way they consider the car to be primary and exalted also shapes the broader environment for walking, bicycling, and transit.

In the county, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of walking definitely (biking less so, transit maybe even less), and that to work to get elected officials and government agencies to change their way of thinking, what they do, what is funded, the programs that are created takes a long long time.

(I would argue that change/improvement can be accelerated, it doesn't have to take forever, but that doesn't mean that the process is easy, and it does take a change-advocacy oriented approach in order to bring it about. Such an approach is atypical for government agencies.)

Anyway, one of the women commented how when I started the Powerpoint she was prepared for the presentation to be "just like all the others", boring, etc., but that it was a great presentation.

I laughed.

I said that I got my start sitting in the audience, just like her, and I sat in the audience bored too (I still have that problem at many conferences), saying "I would do the project like this..." were I in the position to be able to run the project.

Well, now I am in the position to run the project, and while I am not the greatest Powerpoint producer in the world (and the presentations get vetted by my boss and changed after internal presentations where we focus on making the message clear and succinct [for me], but without a lot of visual geegaws--in any case, it's not just me creating the presentation), I do know what the important points are, how to convey ideas and present, how to deal with the public, and how to focus on what really matters.

(Now if I could just get citizens to stop lecturing me about the importance of sustainability and sustainable transportation...)