California Dreamin'

All right everybody, it's time I leveled with my readers for just a bit. One of the main constructive criticisms I've gotten on this blog is that it's not very personal - there's not enough David-ness about it. I will admit this is true, it's mostly not my style to actually blog about my personal life and way easier to geek out about news, culture, or current events. Guilty! I also worry about the long-term consequences of having a LOT of personal information permanent published to the web. As many folks have discovered, your Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, and many other profiles leave an indelible residue online even long after you've closed your accounts. Countless hapless people today are in lawsuits over termination from their jobs due to some of the less-than-professional behavior they've posted to the Interwebs. So let's just say I try to err on the side of caution, with some exceptions, and not reveal anything I wouldn't in a job interview or conversation with a stranger in the grocery store. 


Now for a change of pace! Time to get fucking personal for a second. I've been gearing up for a move to California this August for several months now. Part of my motivation for doing so is career-related - I'll just leave it at that :). 


I started looking fiendishly for jobs last year in the run-up to my graduation from UW for two reasons: 1) I wanted to gain a year or two of solid career experience before going back to grad school; 2) I simply didn't know how else to support myself independently. I wasn't comfortable with doing some of the things many of my friends had done post-graduation. Travel the world for a year? Sure, who wouldn't love to do that? I had just studied abroad for six months of '09 in Spain and I honestly didn't want to leave :D But after graduation, when the premise of "academics" (using the term loosely) is gone? How would I justify that to my parents, or to my depleted bank account? In some respects, I regretting rushing into the career world with such intensity and wish I had been more thoughtful about the choice I ended up making. Just because a company wants recent college grads and sounds good in its offer letter doesn't mean it's the right fit. This doesn't mean that my company is a bad company, just perhaps not the right fit at this point in my life. Bottom line: I'm starting to realize I want a bit more excitement and, frankly, danger,  in my life than any 9-5 career-oriented job can give me.


At 23, I have already accomplished a full-time, salaried, managerial position at a major facilities corporation. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that I'm still young and have many more years of working drudgery ahead of me. Many of the people I meet in a professional context are flabbergasted when they realize my age, as if stunned to see that I've made it to the level of being their perceived equal so quickly. "How did you become a Safety Manager?" (at 23) is one of my favorite questions I could be asked, and there is a long and juicy story behind it for those who are interested. My point is that I've already achieved a lot of what I had intended to when I first entered the career world after graduation last year. So there is no real rush to that next promotion, or even a "lateral move" to another company. Many people who are in their late 20s or even 30s are still waiting tables, temping, "interning", or otherwise indulging in the life stage that's coming to be known as "adultolescence". 


Which brings me to California...Ah, yes - magical, sunny, clusterfuck California! Matt and I are looking at California not just because of its weather and for a change of pace - it's the chance to have the freedom and yes, perhaps just a bit of "edginess" that life in Seattle seems to have exhausted itself of. Our friends are intimate and well-established, we have good jobs and a great apartment in a great neighborhood. Everything is pretty much as it should be for we future members of the bourgeoisie :) Perhaps we are already there!

We now have our sights set on San Francisco...wow, let's take a second to let that sink in. SAN FRANCISCO!!! First, San Francisco is almost impossible not to love. It's an intimidatingly gorgeous place filled with exciting, walkable, unique neighborhoods. I want nothing more than to simply be a part of it in this time and place in the world. It is also very expensive, but not nearly as bad as I first thought. A decent two-bedroom apartment in a good area can be had for about $2,000. With Matt and our future roommate (shoutout to my favorite Jewbaby, Rachael Mammen!), this is very do-able even if I were to get a temp/admin job or work as a server. Hell, I could work at a Trader Joes and still afford $700/month! Part of my motivation is to establish in-state residency for when I begin grad school in fall of 2012. My hope is to get into a Masters of Urban Planning program at either UC Berkeley, UCLA, or USC, though I'll also be applying to Hunter College, Columbia, Harvard, UTexas at Austin, and several programs in Europe. I've already taken the GRE's and am working on letters of rec, and I'll be finishing up applications this fall.  California is probably the place cursed with some of the worst urban planning systems in the world, yet also some of its most innovative centers of knowledge. The upscale foodie-industrial complex of San Francisco/Berkeley and the decayed suburbia of the Inland Empire might as well be on different planets. Both have something to offer in terms of unique planning challenges.  Fingers crossed! But grad school won't start until a year from when we move in August. So the way I see it, I have a year to establish residency, work, and make connections. Matt is just returning from interviews this weekend, so he could conceivably move within the next few weeks, in which case I would hold out in Seattle until our lease is up in August. I already have contacts at several very good temp agencies who will be getting my call soon :) And then the next chapter begins!

Looking East from Castro towards the Mission

View from Buena Vista Park in the Haight

Alcatraz - view from Telegraph Hill

Sunset on the Golden Gate

North Beach sunset

Coit Tower

 
Needless to say, California and its opportunities, its culture, its problems have been on my mind a lot lately. I came across this documentary via GOOD magazine. GOOD  has been an invaluable resource to me on California because the whole magazine is pretty much like a place-based Bible circumscribed to fit my interests. They have sections on urban planning, politics, culture, the environment, and economy that seem to predict my interests before I even think of them! They also have great resources on up-and-coming non-profits, movements, and the sorts of under-the-radar issues that end up defining the mainstream news media agenda when it finally pulls its head out of its ass. 


I found this short documentary on California's economic woes and opportunities via the GOOD website. It's a Dutch-produced short film tracking people of varying economic and social backgrounds and how they are tackling life's challenges post-recession in the city of Los Angeles. Subjects include homeless (formerly lower-middle class) families living out of their RV's, ex-gang members, immigrants, and new bohemians in Silver Lake and Los Feliz. Some of the hipsters / bohemians featured around the 39:00 mark really struck a chord with me. The subject is an architect who starts an urban communal farm in the middle of the city. She has much to say about "the way forward" out of California's mess, even giving a shout-out to bike infrastructure, food systems, and other topics my fellow CEPsters would find intriguing. Very interesting stuff, the video is about 40 mins long, I highly recommend you check it out and post your thoughts!

Here's the intro:

"California is a strong brand, the state of new beginnings, dreams and movie stars, of surfers and a wonderful climate. But the Golden State is bankrupt and the city of Los Angeles is running out of cash. Public services are being cut and unemployment keeps rising. At the same time, optimism, entrepreneurship and the belief in the power of America are stronger than ever.
In Los Angeles, we meet five people who are going through a transformation in their lives during this crisis. Justin and Christine lost their jobs and are now living in a van with their two young sons. Charles has gotten out of prison after fourteen years. Mizuko prepares her children for the future by making them at ease in virtual reality. Laura has taken advantage of the crisis by buying land cheaply and starting an urban farm and artists collective Fallen Fruit maps the abundant free 'public fruit' available in the city. Who are the pioneers who are reinventing the new America and how do they see the future?"

Via: GOOD

So...What Do You Do Exactly?

Every so often, I find an article that hits the nail on the head for exactly what I wish I could say, if only so eloquently. When I was in school at UW and told people that I studied urban planning (don't even get me started with Geography!), I was met with blank stares and mild eye-rolling 90% of the time. You wanna do what now? The other 10% probably has some idea of the profession and assumes you are either a) an architecture school reject or b) a lost hippie who wants to create urban farms to feed organic food to the homeless - don't worry, some of us still do!

Really urban planning is much more simple than that. I want to be able to take people's vague ideas of what a "sustainable" future is supposed to look like and put them into practice. Are you happy with your current lifestyle? Do you worry about pollution and its effect on your health? Do you hate your morning commute and wish there was an alternative to sitting in your car wasting fuel while you idle? Do you wonder why you can't walk to your corner store the way your parents could? Ever wonder how your city will restructure itself due to the recession? Where its jobs will come from? Well, that's where urban planners come in. Because I'm terrible at explaining things like this, I'll leave it to a PhD student at UMaryland whose full article is below:

It happened again, as it invariably does every holiday season. In the midst of spiced eggnog and office holiday parties or visiting with family and friends, I get asked a simple question: “What do you do?” I politely say, “I study urban planning.” And then there’s the inevitable silence as I wait for the quizzical follow-up – “What’s that?” – and another brooding year of Christmas heartache. However, this year something changed. After I uttered my usual phrase, “I study urban planning,” my speech was met with a “Wow, that’s really cool,” and “Ah, that’s interesting, I have a friend who is studying that,” or my personal favorite: “I wish I had gone into planning rather than settle for law school.”  Yes, the field of urban planning was met with unbridled enthusiasm as I made the rounds this holiday season. A Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle? I think not.

The plain truth is that urban planning is hot. If we take a look at the numbers, according to the Department of Labor, the urban and regional planning field is expected to grow by nineteen percent, from 38,400 jobs in 2008 to 45,700 jobs by 2018. Moreover, quite apparent is that a burgeoning global population has created the need for additional infrastructure including transportation systems, affordable housing, and schools while simultaneously existing infrastructure needs repair and restoration. It is no wonder that U.S. News and World Report included urban planning as one of the fifty best careers for 2011. But this is really just the beginning. 

In his notable work, Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester describes planning or designing as “a deeply social process of making sense together.” Planners, to appropriate the sociologist’s C. Wright Mills language, translate personal troubles into public issues.  Moreover, they help individuals and communities communicate and develop visions for the future based upon shared interests, values, and norms. In a time and place where the prospect of the future seems uncertain, unsettling and even frightening at times, the expertise that planners bring is needed more than ever. In this context, a perfect storm of factors is contributing to an auspicious growth for the field. 

Let’s be straight: Urban planning is and traditionally has been a relatively obscure field in a relatively obscure set of disciplines known as the social sciences (we like to talk things out). In her article “Planning Theory’s Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice,” Judith Innes writes, “There are probably 1,500 people today who hold a planning Ph.D. The proportion of educators with a Ph.D. in planning is steadily increasing.” This was in 1995. Today, my educated guess is there are in the range of 2,500-3,000 people with planning Ph.D.’s and they are in more places than walking the corridors of the Ivory Tower both here and abroad. You can find them in think tanks, NGOs, law firms, and public policy organizations. In terms of academia, one only need take a glance at the Job Bank on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) website to see the plethora of faculty jobs available. Indeed, the L. Douglas Wilder School at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) alone has announced it will be filling ten or more tenure-track or tenured positions in the coming two years. Ten positions! That’s larger than the entirety of many planning departments, and along with a number of new positions, the field is seeing whole programs commence and become newly accredited including those at Boise State University and the University of Louisville, among others. To put this in perspective for those new to the field, the annual planning conference for academics draws between 400-500 individuals yearly. The field is not large; we aren’t talking a department of history, economics, or political science here. We are talking about a field where there are at present fifty-four openings for urban planning faculty (I counted). 

Why all the activity?  A constellation of factors are at play, including:

• The first full generation of trained planners are on the eve of retirement

• The growing relevance and significance of planning, both locally and globally from Dubai to Detroit reflected by the ascent of wealth and the capacity to build mega-project (e.g. as in Dubai), but also the ascent of poverty resultant from failed public policy, markets, and structural economic forces (e.g. Detroit)

• The growing visibility of planning through media (including this magazine) and the blogosphere thereby precipitating more interest from the general public

As both supply and demand factors continue to incentivize the field, the explicit notion that both individuals and communities are looking for answers and find themselves increasingly reflected in the language of planning, whether tacitly or knowingly, begs the question: What does this emergence mean for how we train planners for the future? It is a question that generations of planners have considered, including Paul Davidoff and Judith Innes. 

Davidoff, regarded as the founder of advocacy planning, described in his 1965 article Advocacy and Pluralism in Planningthe need to broaden the scope of a planners’ education. He wished to widen the focus of planning to include all areas of concern within government. He speaks to the primary role the planner has as a coordinator and suggests that two years of graduate study may be insufficient to broadly train planners for this difficult job. Judith Innes, writing in the mid-1990s, notes the importance of allowing students to take over their own learning processes. She references an anecdote in a teaching workshop she attended which imbued her with a Deweyian lesson, “that learning by doing has far more power than simply learning by reading or listening and that social learning – learning as part of a group effort – has important advantages over the solitary investigation of the lonely researcher.” More recently, Leonie Sandercock contends the need for “therapeutic” processes to transform urban spaces from places of fear (racial, socio-economic, etc) to places of cohabitation and coexistence. Such processes could be structured in helping residents organize meetings in moving from fixed positions to shared interests. These three scholars are but three voices over planning’s lifespan that add to the discourse on planning pedagogy. The ascent of issues such as all things sustainability-related, social justice, and international development planning only contribute to the dialogue on what a planner should be learning.   

Peter Bosselmann, a professor of urban design in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that among his students,

“

There’s an interest in international work right now, which probably has to do with the economy . . . Geographically, China is very important, as is India, and we assume that soon the urbanization of Africa will start becoming of interest. [Topic-wise], the environment is becoming stronger and stronger, especially the forces of nature and how they’re acting on cities, such as the rising of water tables.”

What so many of us love about planning is that it is dynamic. And urgently so. From the growing wealth gaps in the United States and globally, to environmental issues, individuals come to planning because they wish to effect change. We can only hope that as the institution of planning moves into the next decade, planners will be more cogent of their past, their context, and their responsibilities to their craft in embracing this dynamism. No Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle required. 

Via: Planetizen

New USDA Map Allows You to Find a Farmer's Market Anywhere

The USDA revamped its National Farmers Market Directory with a mappable, searchable database. It's hardly going to be a signature of the Obama Administration, but it's still useful to know where the closest farmer's market is no matter where you are.

Interesting how this was rolled out just in time for...winter?

Via: Obama Foodorama

Garden-sharing! There's an app for that, too :)

Originally posted to the CEP blog, Fruit from the Tree.

I know how many of you CEPsters secretly (or not all secretly!) want to get your hands dirty with your very own little plot of urban garden. I can taste the organic tomatoes already! Many of you may even have done, or will do, your Senior Projects about urban gardening.

One of the major stumbling blocks for tapping into the public's desire for urban gardening is the lack of available space; most P-Patch gardens in Seattle, like the one near where I live in Eastlake, for instance, have a year-long waiting list. By this time, for many aspiring gardeners, the initial passion is gone and the effort is wasted.

Thanks to the efforts of some smart web developers, however, we now have Craigslist-like interactive directories of available garden space for the taking in Seattle and many other cities.


For instance,  a simple search on We Patch reveals at least a dozen available plots within two miles of the UW campus. In addition to listing available spaces, it creates a powerful and easy-to-use community of fellow gardeners, connecting landowners who have extra yardspace to eager gardeners ready to plant. Other sites like Urban Gardenshare allow you to create a Facebook-like profile to narrow down your preferences and find the exact right plot for you.

Portland's Yardshare does the same thing in CEP's sister city. Even the City of Santa Monica has recognized the long wait-times for new gardeners to its programs and created a garden-sharing registry for gardeners to sidestep the bureaucracy and get established in their plots on their own.

For those of you still looking for Senior Projects, or really anyone interested in urban food systems, I would highly recommend reaching out to these organizations that could be real assets to CEP!

Great Local Press for Co-Ops and CEP!

One of my favorite aspects of CEP, the Community, Environment, and Planning program at the University of Washington, was its emphasis on project-based learning. I have told many of my friends and colleagues this before, but I will reiterate: without CEP's focus on applied learning and planning education in the field, I would not have landed the job that I have or gotten nearly as much out of my UW education. By working on Evergreen Fleets for a full year as my Senior Project, I learned how project management, networking, and interdisciplinary knowledge could be brought together in real time. But of course, Evergreen Fleets was not the only amazing project to spring forth out of CEP in 2010. Many of my fellow students created incredible works in fields as diverse as bicycle commuting, education, urban gardening, co-operative business, transportation, and student activism on campus. Today's post shines a light on one of the most successful and innovative projects to come out of CEP in many years.

Last year, it seemed like the idea of forming co-ops had swept across CEP by storm and were more popular than ever as a way of putting diverse projects into action. A piece in Crosscut, the top online local news site, by UW Communications student Shane Clyburn, focuses on the efforts of CEPsters in the growth of co-ops in the Seattle area. In particular, the intersection between CEP, co-ops, and larger institutions like HFS and UW could be the way forward in promoting environmental sustainability and social justice from the ground up. The UW Student Food Co-op, founded by CEP students Matt Steele and Michelle Harvey, is mentioned as an exemplar of what is to come!

Seattle is a vibrant place for cooperative businesses. The city is home to large and successful co-ops such as REI, PCC Natural Markets, and Group Health, plus credit unions such as BECU and SMCU. The fact that the UW, the largest organization in the city, doesn’t address this at all shows a great disconnect between the institution and the city it serves.

This past weekend was the second annual SLICE conference. Standing for Strengthening Local Independent Cooperatives Everywhere, SLICE brought many to Seattle to discuss the growing cooperative movement and what should be done to strengthen existing co-ops and incubate new ones. City Council President Richard Conlin spoke briefly about Seattle’s co-op scene and voiced his support for the movement.

Students at the UW are forming a cooperative cafe to provide healthy food at an affordable price for students. They will be working with local farmers and other co-ops in the area to supply the café. The co-op will also provide an educational opportunity for its members about cooperative business models and sustainable food systems.

The UW could get behind this movement and offer classes in cooperative economics and cooperative business. The opportunities for students to find internships and develop relationships with co-ops in Seattle is tremendous. The university should take the initiative and become a leader in fostering cooperatives in Seattle and beyond.