Understanding Urbanity

The sunset of my last thesis class—and of college in general

For someone whose main academic focus has been (urban) planning, I don’t tend to do too much of it for my life, beyond the immediate choices facing me and a vague sense of what I want to do. Going into urban planning has long been my default assumption, though I’ve also given more thought recently into pursuing a career in academia. Though I’ve learned a lot about how planning acts in relation to community engagement and what the overall thrust of planning departments are, I know relatively little about what the work of planners in various functions within municipal departments entails or if public sector planning is really what I want to do. Thus, I currently want to get a couple years of experience before I (almost assuredly) go to grad school, so that I have a somewhat more informed perspective on what this field involves as a profession, rather than as a topic for academic study.  I definitely don’t want to do permitting for an extended period of time, though some amount is probably necessary if/when I get a job within a municipal planning department.

This year, I intend to find my way into an entry level position related to urban planning, hopefully working as an intern for a planning consulting firm or a nonprofit. Most of the entry level municipal planning positions require somewhat more experience/education than I have, and tend to be quite competitive, so I will probably focus most of my efforts on contacting small organizations working on housing/land use/transportation/planning issues. My GIS skills will definitely help out with the search, being a marketable skill that organizations often need—though I am a little wary of being put onto a track of purely GIS work. While I don’t have (and don’t particularly want to get) a GIS certification and lack the technical spatial database management skills, I think I am well prepared for performing the more interesting open-ended data analysis and GIS work for smaller firms using spatial analysis. My troubleshooting abilities and open-ended research skills definitely position me well for this type of generalized GIS position—I can almost always take a set of goals/desired outcomes and figure out a way to reach those goals. I’ve mostly neglected the job hunt so far this semester, being pretty wrapped up in thesis and other work. In two weeks time, though, I’ll be grinding through my lists of the potential contacts and organizations, working as a bike courier to make a little money. Over the next two years, I will find a position (or series of temporary positions) within the broad urban planning sector, most likely doing some combination of data gathering/analysis, on-demand GIS work, writing, and assistance with other projects as needed. I also aim to get my thesis published in an undergraduate academic journal and will take the GRE at some point in about a year.

My intention is to apply for a graduate school program in Urban Planning (or potentially Geography) at the end of next year, so I would begin grad school in fall 2019. There’s some decisions I need to make about where to apply/attend, which have some bearing on where I want to work and what I want to do (i.e. academic track vs consulting or governmental work). I’d prefer to stay on the West Coast, and have briefly looked at UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC, and UBC, in addition to the University of Washington (probably the most affordable option and very practical in terms of career connections/prospects in Seattle). I have also considered some schools further abroad, like UPenn, University of Illinois, and MIT. I think I’m overall quite well qualified for attending a selective program, though tuition costs will definitely be a consideration. While in graduate school, I will continue gaining work experience through concurrent internships (generally a requirement at most master’s urban planning programs).

That brings me to mid-2021, at which point I will ideally be pursuing a full-time professional planning career (involving a municipal position and working towards AICP accreditation) or moving towards a PhD program. Over the course of these five years, I want to maintain an acceptable work-life balance, foster fulfilling relationships, and meaningfully apply the critical perspectives I’ve gained in ENVS to my actions in the world outside this campus bubble.

This week involved the final presentation of my thesis to the ENVS 160, the Intro course to the major. I compressed the presentation even further than I had for Festival of Scholars, cramming the essential parts of the thesis into 10 minutes. Overall, I’d say I succeeded, though I think that I probably present a more convincing and nuanced argument on paper than verbally presenting. That fact that my presentation was juxtaposed with Drew’s much more positive interpretation of municipal investment in light rail interestingly emphasized the diversity of methods and importance of context within Environmental Studies, though I am worried that it may have left people with a reductionist message about Portland failing and Strasbourg succeeding—one of the 160 students approached me afterward to say that I bet I wished that Portland had Strasbourg’s tram system.

Over, my thesis is essentially done, with the only things left being more or less revisions of this subsite (mostly focused on turning the unwieldy methods/regression section into something more approachable), administrative verification of school records, and final copy edits of the paper. Coursework seems to abhor a vacuum, though, and I’ve hardly had idle time to kill. I did a bunch of work for my final paper for City and Society—an analysis of a local organization working on urban issues and its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, using the course material/theories. I chose to volunteer with and examine the Community Alliance of Tenants (CAT), a tenants union working to educate renters of their rights, organize communities/buildings, and lobby for legislative/political reform. It’s been an interesting capstone of the capstone, providing a way to see how the critique of the land community logic that I advance in my thesis is materially advanced by urban nonprofits.

I phone banked for CAT for several hours, calling people on CAT’s contact list to get them to call their legislators in support of HB 2004, a statewide bill to ban no-cause evictions and allow local governments to enact rent stabilization measures. I also researched CAT’s campaigns over the past few years through a variety of social media and news sources. While I’m very sympathetic to CAT’s aims and it has appeared to be successful in forcing some material reforms in Portland governance, I can’t exactly resist the academic urge to critique. I actually found myself thinking of Steinberg’s Who Rules The Earth? quite frequently when thinking through how to interpret CAT. Its work is commendable, but it works within a very fragmented nonprofit network and it has a strikingly idealistic sense of the proper realm of action. In terms of its political reforms, CAT is too small to act as an alternative power institution itself, so its methods for shaping rules around housing provision are ad hoc in nature. CAT will come together with OPAL, APANO, the Oregon Opportunity Network, the Urban League, and Living Cully on a recurring basis for the purpose of winning a campaign, setting up a logo, website, name, and identity for that campaign—all of which falls away following victory, even when that “victory” consists merely of getting their discourse accepted as part of the official planning language. They have thus far been unable to realize (or progress towards) their ultimate goal of creating new, social modes of land ownership.

With my paper (essentially) finished and successfully defended, and my presentation at the Festival of Scholars to be done tomorrow, it has truly begun to feel like the end of college and my undergraduate major in Environmental Studies. As part of this coda, my senior thesis class is reading the same book as the Environmental Studies Intro course (ENVS 160), Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives, by Paul Steinberg. We will be discussing it and the major at large with ENVS 160 next week. As part of this process, we have also been instructed to read through the ENVS 160 students’ posts on what they’ve learned from the course and takeaways from Who Rules the Earth? The book is intended for a popular audience, communicating insights from social science research about how important social rules and institutions (laws, customs, and governance structures) are in shaping environmental outcomes.

Steinberg argues that, while individual actions (i.e. lifestyle environmentalism) may be morally laudable, we must change the institutions that govern behavior to actually create meaningful and lasting change. He further argues the institutions that govern governance, setting the structure for how decisions are made—the “super rules”—are particularly important. Other important points focus on an emphasis on scale—how the local scale is not inherently good and how activists need to engage with multiple levels of governance (which he terms “vertical thinking”), paying attention to the most relevant institutional scale for each environmental issue and context. I chafed a little at Steinberg’s optimistic emphasis on the potential for win-win solutions—the book contains few insights for how opposing interests are and should be balanced. I found faults in his sometimes shallow presentation/understanding of the political economy. Steinberg certainly isn’t a Marxist—you won’t find any mention of the contradictions of capitalism in Who Rules the Earth?, and a discussion of how capitalist markets operate as institutions is conspicuously absent (excepting his discussion of emerging/proposed markets for pollution). He represents the problems of capitalism as accidental or circumstantial, rather than arising from its internal logic. These objections to the specifics of Who Rules the Earth? aside, I wholly agree with the broad thrust of Steinberg’s argument.

After four years of Environmental Studies and related courses, the notion that nature is socially constructed and that institutional action is the only real way to change the world is thoroughly ingrained in my consciousness. Overall, little in the book was conceptually new to me, besides the argument that regulations are a significant driver of technological innovation. It is hard for me to remember a time before I thought this way and I don’t think I was ever nearly as wedded to lifestyle environmentalism as many of the 160 students seem to have been (and, in some cases, still are). Nevertheless, regardless of how receptive I may have been to critiques of lifestyle environmentalism and the nature-culture dichotomy, they are ideas which I have really only been extensively exposed to through my college education. In their individual reflection posts, many of the 160 students expressed some degree of dismay and confusion as a result of the Intro course, feeling that everything they thought they knew about the environment and environmental studies had been thrown into question. Many entered expecting some mixture of learning scientific information about environmental problems and activism to promote straightforward solutions. Instead, ENVS challenges these conceptual foundations.

To any 160 students reading this: don’t worry, it will get easier. If you stick with the major, you’ll end up accepting most of the precepts of contemporary environmentalism, carve out a niche in which you can actually learn and develop expertise about something, and won’t just be dealing with Jim asking you to be more precise with word usage. You won’t just be spending all your time deconstructing your own theoretical constructs about nature—you’ll start deconstructing everyone else’s (though if you still expect it to be an environmental science major, you should probably look into biology). One final point: you aren’t going to come to a eureka moment in which you’ve understood all the nuances and sides of an issue and suddenly are equipped to offer The Solution. Solutions don’t simply emerge from a full investigation of the problem; they are political, bringing unforeseen consequences and bestowing costs and benefits that are both unequally-distributed and difficult to assess. Keep in mind the idea of the risk society—that contemporary problems are the result of solutions to previous problems.

This past week I focused on converting my (essentially) finished thesis into presentation-ready media—a poster for my panel presentation next week at the Festival of Scholars and a PowerPoint for my thesis defense this morning. Distilling a 50 page paper into the minimal text (and fretting over aesthetics and positioning) was a surprisingly time-intensive task. Despite my intentions to create a somewhat minimalist design, I ended up including quite a bit of text in the poster. I included my two main graphics (edited to increase legibility on the poster and align with my chosen font), my methodology for obtaining those graphics, a brief description of what I found through the investigation of planning documents, a barebones background, and a schematic of the implications. While I toyed with the idea of a more thematic/topical poster, ala Gabby Henrie’s poster from a couple years ago, my presentation of quantitative results forced a design more reflective of hard science poster norms. Unlike in previous poster designs, I stayed away from explicitly labeling sections according to their rigid format (e.g. the background, results, implications), opting for more descriptive titles, which I think makes it a little more compelling and slightly easier to grasp the main thrust of my argument at a glance. I mostly hewed to the traditional 3-column poster design, with a relatively linear progression and organization (top-down flow within each column, moving through the columns left to right). I paid special attention to the balance between color and white space, attempting to subtly inject orange themes into a clean and readable design.

The other big part of this week was my thesis defense, the presentation to my thesis committee. My PowerPoint is posted below:

The thesis defense went quite well (after some starting mishaps around not knowing that the projector’s HDMI port was in the floor and running over to IT to chase down a cable to plug directly into the projector)—I got awarded honors! Reconfiguring my investigation into a 15-20 minute presentation involved some rethinking of how to concisely convey the background information. While I used an extensive history of urban planning to situate my arguments in the paper, sketching out the parallels and contrasts between modernism and contemporary urbanism to contextualize and explain the emergence of gentrification, I couldn’t exactly do this in the allotted time. Instead, I jumped right into neoliberalism as it pertains to cities, followed by a brief description of gentrification and gentrification theories and then moving into smart growth. Even this limited contextualization proved to be too long, as I ended up spending about 15 minutes on the background, forcing me to speed through the rest of the presentation and ultimately going over the given time. While this wasn’t a huge issue for the thesis defense, I will definitely need to tighten up the background for my panel presentation at the Festival of Scholars next week. Another issue to work through is the balance of planning context and my quantitative results—my sense is that the contextual information is more engaging than detailing the exact structure and findings of my regression analysis, though I also need to adequately explain my own original research.

After the presentation came questions from the committee members. Nate posed the question of how the contradiction in transit planning that I highlight might be better understood by incorporating the perspectives and motivations of homebuyers. He cited the paper’s somewhat lopsided examination of the contradictions of transit planning through the understandings and actions of planners as the only real flaw/gap within the research. While this was somewhat outside the scope of my research questions, his modest critique was that ethnographic research would create a fuller account of how transit planning functions within an actor-network—that homeownership is increasingly seen as a short-term speculative commodity in which proximity to transit may be valued purely for the exchange value purposes. I do address this briefly in my conclusion, discussing how transit functions as simply an amenity, conveying value via speculation about how market actors collectively value it. This discussion is, however, at a quite coarse scale. Jim and Liz then asked me to reflect on how I arrived at my thesis/my journey within Environmental Studies (in terms of developing theoretical sophistication and technical skills) and on who I would want to convey this research to. I explained that courses I’d taken within the Political Economy minor had given me a strong conceptual footing; that my technical skills (in terms of regression analysis and GIS) were mostly self-taught, via internet resources and academic writing; and that my experience with OPAL primed me for thinking about Portland’s transit investments as being in service of the local growth machine. I answered that I would hope to convey my research to local left-leaning political groups (like OPAL and the Community Alliance of Tenants, among others), to help disseminate the notion that activists should push for affordable housing wherever amenity investment strategies are deployed.

Download (PDF, 5.03MB)

Well, it’s done: that Sisyphean, seemingly endless task of writing a thesis has come to a final close. Never again will I look at a five page paper as being long—that’s basically just the introduction! Overall, my revisions from the official first were mercifully short, consisting of minor edits throughout and modest additions to/reorganizations of the bottom of the hourglass. Breaking apart the implications section into the Interpreting and Contesting subsections definitely helped organize my concluding thoughts and go into slightly more detail. In the first subsection, I focused on 1) how the transit premium can be interpreted differentially by class position and outlook, 2) how, because development is viewed as a goal of transit planning, planners are implicitly aligned in support of land value appreciation and gentrification, and 3) that the rhetoric of smart growth presents such growth as socially and environmentally beneficial. In the second subsection, I followed more of an open-ended extension of this discussion, noting how class conflict is hidden by neoliberalism and smart growth and musing on the scope and direction of smart growth gentrification. In the end, I only added about two pages to the implications section, though I painstakingly reordered (and then re-reordered) sentences and paragraphs. I’m still not perfectly happy with the Implications section; I feel it is a little staccato in its organization, with the breadth of concepts covered diminishing the flow from paragraph to paragraph.

I also tried to end on a somewhat less polemical tone than my original draft. After weeks of plowing through re-reading gentrification sources and crafting a cohesive, extended written argument, my views about planning’s role in gentrification had become rather deeply cynical—I began to channel far too much of Mike Davis (e.g. “The long-term vision is housing in livable, diverse, multi-modal neighborhoods as a social right; the present reality is amenity provision as a variously intentional and inadvertent strategy of urban renewal, raising land values, spatially isolating an underclass, and attracting the footloose capital and middle class for which the spectacles of gentrification are constructed” or “the basic patterns of globally-oriented neoliberal gentrification are replicated, naturalized, and suffused with salutatory greening language” or  “Gentrification-displacement knows no final bounds; London, the city that inspired the term gentrification, now faces the displacement of the upper class from its toniest districts, local wealthy professionals outbid by a hypermobile global elite primarily using real estate as a store of value. While this fate hardly awaits all neighborhoods or all cities, it makes starkly apparent the inequitable ends to which unrestrained commodification of land can extend”).

Though I stand by these assessments as reflecting a truth about urban planning, and I’ve left these polemical sentences substantially unaltered in my final draft, I don’t think this is the full truth of what planning is or the progression of gentrification involves and have attempted to include some more nuance in the argument. Thus, I added in a bit more discussion of how dynamic contradictions play into the issue of gentrification: the extent to which gentrification has progressed has also created a noticeable political countermovement, a movement in which I see a degree of hope. I hint at the need for embracing clumsy solutions in response to transit-induced gentrification, noting that the solutions emerging will have their own problems (inclusionary zoning ties us even more strongly to private development as a social good, affordable housing subsidies are expensive), but it is through this experimentation with forms that the city can be regenerated. I also included a modest defense of urbanism, despite my persistent attacks on the ways in which transit-oriented development models materially sideline equity. It’s a delicate balance, to be sure, and one which probably muddles my argument slightly, but I felt the need to defend a vision that I do ultimately support, lest this work be simply taken up by the anti-city/anti-transit crowd as an example of the problems of governmental social engineering.