Comments on: When Planning Doesn’t Matter

By: Hasdai Westbrook

Hasdai Westbrook — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:38:12 +0000

Sure. Lighting’s good for everyone. But it wouldn’t be as much of a priority if the case hadn’t been made in places like Vienna that it was a particular concern for women. Then again, the more light we have the more light pollution there’ll be and we won’t be able to see the stars. Light pollution also impacts wildlife, disrupting bird migration patterns and causing birds to crash land and die (really!). It disrupts feeding and mating patterns, changes that ripple through the ecosystem, to the point where Robins are chirping earlier, disrupting my sleep, making me exponentially crankier so I’m more likely to get into a road rage incident on my morning commute, ruin someone else’s day, and raise my blood pressure, putting a strain on the nation’s health system 🙂 And so on and so on.

By: thegoodplan

thegoodplan — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:54:48 +0000

Hasdai- Thanks for the comment!
I think your link between better lighting and women is somewhat disconnected. Lighting helps everyone -it’s a safety issue for visibility, as well as crime reduction. And YES! Much urban planning amounts to social manipulation (I like that term). There are a couple of articles i love that explain behavioral engineering – One is from the Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21541709 on crowd dynamics (LOVE!) and the other is about the deliberately slow clocks at Grand Central: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-clocks-at-grand-central-station-are-permanently-wrong/272768/ . So yes, urban planning absolutely can manipulate behavior. That said, if you really want frosted flakes and they’ve been moved out of reach at the grocery store, won’t you still find a way to get them? Its more inconvenient, yes, but if you want those flakes, then you’ll find a way to get them.

I want to hear more about your last point where good intentions can destroy other things we value – example? Help me get it – i can’t yet.

Thanks for thinking.
l.

By: Hasdai Westbrook

Hasdai Westbrook — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:40:29 +0000

As something of a “South Park Liberal” (one of the few), I’m averse to social engineering and any infringement on people’s innate right to be assholes, but much of what you describe – better lighting for instance – seems like sensible public policy to me and a recognition that women are targeted more frequently by violent criminals. I agree with you that urban planning, or any policy or regulation for that matter, shouldn’t strive to change men’s souls (or women’s for that matter), but isn’t it fair to say that some if not all urban planning amounts in effect and often in intent to some form of social manipulation, not all of it bad? We’re trying to design space and people’s interactions with it – that’s inevitably going to have social and even political implications. The tricky part, I think, is that a lot of efforts are overly mechanistic – they treat urban and social space as a machine to be corrected and optimized rather than a complex ecosystem where good intentions can cause chaotic and powerful feedbacks that whipsaw back and destroy other things we value, perhaps even the change we were trying to create in the first place.