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Originally Posted by someone123
This is what I figured. It seems pretty flawed since a lot of planners care about issues like access to housing but that can't be separated from economics. Neither can transportation issues if you actually care about people being able to get places, which is an unavoidable part of the issues of access to income and housing. While there are other concerns, these along with social cohesion and the provision of core public services like healthcare and education (also reliant on transportation) are the basics of cities in our society.
I suspect the problem goes deep in that being an activist or idea person can be pretty high status these days. Particularly in the public sector, you can get far without implementing concrete things that can be objectively judged for success or failure. Private business is a bit less affected by this because at the end of the day they have to make money, although big corporations can handle a lot of bloat.
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I think the main issue is that it's just the opposite in that rather than "idea people" being high status, there's an increasingly common sentiment nowadays that STEM fields are somehow more concrete and objective while the humanities are somehow frivolous and impractical. I used to lean that way to but I've come to realise there isn't really an objective basis for that. STEM - particularly engineering - are largely realms of the "how". How does society accomplish things. But they tend to be poor at offering insights into what society should accomplish or why. So i think most planners would push back on idea that numbers like average travel times is somehow more concrete and fundamental than numbers such as the rate at which residents feel happy or safe in their communities. Yes, you can move people around faster, but ultimately what's the point if you're not actually improving people's lives?
Just as an aside, I don't know if you listen to the Freakonomics radio podcast (it's one of my favourites) but I remember one episode titled where they interviewed someone who studied the perception of time and found that there are factors apart from the actual length of time that affect how people perceive it. I actually found a
transcript here. "
My point in bringing that up is simply that the role of community planners is to understand how people interact with their spaces, both by communicating with people (surveys, interviews, public consultations), and by observing them, ultimately to consider human health and happiness as it relates to the physical environment. And the way that "concrete numbers" affects people's experience tends to be more of a correlative than a direct relationship as being are very "values" and "perceptions" based. In my experience, people who insist on using specific concrete numbers tend to be begging the question. They have an idea of what outcome they want and sense that if they can convince people to incorporate some alternate set of numbers or criteria into the premises, this this will lead to their desired conclusion.
But some aspects of a planner's job definitely includes concrete numbers. Planning originated as an offshoot of epidemiology and many planners would argue that this is still its closest direct connection to the STEM fields. At Dal, one of the leading planning profs actually started her career as an epidemiologist. Planning started just over 100 years with the tracking of diseases such as dysentery and cholera, and led to designing cities in such a way as to reduce over crowding and providing access to clean water and air, which drove the construction of infrastructure and the separation of uses such as polluting factories from residential etc. Most planners recognise that the separation of uses went too far and led to much of the current trouble with auto dependency and sprawl whose associated effects have become today's most pressing public health issue related to the built form. Today, planners do consider concrete numbers such as the rates of active transportation usage vs car usage, respiratory illness, crime, and social cohesion in addition to health and happiness more broadly. These can definitely be judged for failure or success, although it can be tricky when there are competing factors.
But regardless, while I don't believe that planners need to be more STEM focused, I certainly agree that more education is always better than less.
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