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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Whether or not people enjoy where they're living and find their lives to be enhanced by it is inherently subjective isn't it? It's a matter of how people feel. And that is valuable for those who are making decisions about the design and function of cities. Certainly for planners and politicians, but also for the citizens voting on and otherwise attempting to include such plans. Perhaps we in the forum are not all directly conducting the activism needed to change much, but that's a matter of our actions rather than the subject matter.
However, there are plenty of things that aren't simply subjective interpretations. Transportation planning for instance directly affects the ability of normal people - and businesses - to thrive. And subcategories like traffic congestion, pedestrian safety, air pollution, energy usage etc. can all be empirically measured.
Sorry but these are tangible and directly relevant issues.
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You and I must be on different forums. A cursory glance at the posts on this board and I can boil most posts down to:
- pictures of skylines
- pictures of construction projects
- navel gazing about how French Canadians are different from English Canadians
- Back and forth about how Alberta O&G doesn't get respect
- Lamentations about exterior cladding materials like EIFS and spandrel
- A general philosophy that posits that midrise, sidewalk-hugging 19th century European building forms represent the zenith in urban development and some discussion about which Canadian city is getting there the fastest
This is all good fun, but I don't see any serious planner or urban affairs professional looking at this board and applying it to their job.
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I'm not buying these attempts to paint them as some sort of nebulous fluff for which we don't really know who's measuring what for whom or why. That's just nonsense.
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There are, of course, serious ways of measuring transportation demand or even things like social/health impacts of transportation projects. I never see this on this board, which is okay, because these are highly technical and would probably turn a lot of people off (including me, if I'm coming here to shoot the shit). Talk to the people who run these models, though, and the first thing they'll tell you is that "all models are wrong, but some are useful."
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Sure. For business. This is not primarily a business forum so it isn't going to be that relevant to many of us.
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Yeah, but you made it sound like GaWC does irrelevant work. I'm not the arbiter on what is relevant, but I will say that it costs money to hire people to gather, analyze and report on this kind of macroeconomic data, and they've been around for 20 years so somebody out there probably thinks that what they do is relevant enough to pay for.