John Friedmann in Vienna

Friedmann responding to a question.

It was a great honor to hear Professor John Friedmann speak at the Technical University of Vienna last week. The lecture was fascinating. Here are some of my notes, they are incomplete and the lecture was so full of information that I am sure I got some of it wrong. You can get a copy of the full lecture from the lecture organizer.

Austria-in-the-World: Conversations and Debates about Planning and Development

Friedmann's lecture was structured around nine Austrian "cultural emissaries" who left Vienna for the outside world and directly influenced his thoughts about planning.


The nine are: economists Bertram Hoselitz, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter; the sociologist Karl Mannheim; Martin Buber, a philosopher and Judaic scholar; Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher of language; Karl Popper, a philosopher of science; Paul Feyerabend, also a philosopher of science and a critic of Popper; and Karl Polanyi, an economic historian and social anthropologist.

Although Friedmann did not agree with all these thinkers, they all influenced his work.


Studies at the University of Chicago


Friedmann studied planning at the University of Chicago between 1949 and 1955. Four Austrians who influenced him there were:

Karl Mannheim

Planning could be thought of as an intellectual pursuit, not just a profession.

Democratic planning could be a 3rd path between totalitarian fascism and soviet communism.

Planning is a condition for democratic life, the national state could and should intervene in the market for the benefit of society as a whole.

Belief in the possibilites of a constructive democratic planning by the state.

Succession Vienna, walking to the lecture.

Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)

Social state management is a recipe for disaster.

Strongly opposed to all forms of planning and state intervention.

Planning is a socialist plot.

Hayek's thinking became a model for Margaret Thatcher, his book "a bible she wielded like a battle ax".

Bertram Hoselitz (Economic historian at University of Chicago)

Initiated the multi-disciplinary study of socio-economic development in the US. Founding
editor of the Journal of Economic Development
and Cultural Change (1952).

Focused on the role of cities in economic development: growth pole, world city, urban centered regions.

His work in development studies and the role of cities strongly influenced Friedmann.

Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy 1942)

Earlier work had been on the theory of economic development.

Innovation in economic production and the idea of entrepreneurship took off from his work.

Friedmann linked this concept to Hannah Arendt's idea of "action" (handeln in German) by which she meant "setting something new into the world." For Friedmann planning is pragmatic or institutional innovation ... not regulation and control (which is simply administration).


Another of Schumpeter's famous ideas is creative destruction, where the old is destroyed to make room for the new. In this sense innovation is a form of insurgency against the status quo. Friedmann links this idea to entropy and negative entropy (dissipation and articulated growth). According to Friedmann, our nerves have, to date, been calmed by the illusion of universal progress (bought about by innovation), but he pointed out that "'development' in most of the world usually comes with a negative sign."

The idea of negative entropy comes from Erwin Schroedinger: What is life? (1944) another Viennese.

Wanderjahre and UCLA


After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1955, Friedmann worked as a development specialist in South America, South Korea and Japan (Ford Foundation, USAID, etc.). He also taught at MIT and in 1969 started teaching planning at UCLA where he remained until 1996. 

Friedmann's book "Retracking America" was published in 1973. It grew out of his experience working on development in South America, it caused him to re-think the idea of planning.

Friedmann's idea: planning is a relationship between knowledge and action, it requires dialog.

A form of utopian planning based on local citizen participation.

Karlskirche, walking to the lecture.

Martin Buber (Ich und du, 1923)

Friedmann's idea of transactive planning was influenced by the idea of dialogue and mutuality in Buber's book.

He was also influenced by Buber's idea of utopia, but Friedmann believes that utopias need to remain small.
To Friedmann, innovative planning is inconceivable without a utopia in your imagination.

Karl Popper

Critical connection between knowledge and action.

Ultimate certainty (truth) is attainable.

To Friedmann planning = a science but also means being actively engaged in making change, so: ... What knowledge is sufficiently reliable for the practice of planning? How do we get it?

Paul Feyerabend 
Started as a student of Popper, but rejected Popper's idea of certain truth.
Anarchist theory of knowledge.

Methods cannot be prescribed, results are what ultimately matters = pragmatism.

Multiplicity of knowledges, no single objective knowledge.

Idea of social or mutual learning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (multi-talented rebel without a cause)

Friedmann's book "The Good Society" was directly influenced in content and form by Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus book.

A foundation of thinking about a form of planning not organized by the state.

Moral basis of social practice, ethics.

Karl Polanyi (The Livelihood of Man 1977, link to review)

Friedmann had returned to the more manageable idea of development planning, particularly in the developing world. During the 1980s the idea of large government intervention in development was being replaced (partly as a result of Thatcherism) by the idea of small NGO-based programs. But NGOs cannot deal with the huge structural problems in many developing countries. It was during this period that development planning lost its scheen.

Polanyi's book described development freed from the language of classical economics, ... "Disposable labor is allocated between the production of use values in the moral economy and exchange values in the capitalist economy." Focused on the household as a social institution rather than a utility maximizing individual. Led Friedmann to the concept of social empowerment and a view of poverty defined as a lack of access to the bases of social power (Empowerment: The politics of alternative development).

Some closing thoughts

National boundaries no longer explain much.

Planning is an innovative activity following Hannah Arendt's definition ... innovation is sending something new into the world.

Planning = the relationship between knowing and acting.

Acceleration of human and social change = the acceleration of local history.

Planning is a dynamic pattern of interacting forces, but it's almost impossible to see these forces.

In China planning is more of a ritual activity rather than a guiding force, change is happening too fast for the existing planning structure to keep up.

Planning theory = part of a theory of socio-spatial change ... planning is normative, but history just goes on.

Questions and Answers

Organized civil society = Friedmann's hope for the future.

A tacit knowing is needed, but how do we get it? To Popper knowledge was 'free floating' somewhere above us, if only we could find it.

But, when we do find it, is it true? We know much knowledge today is generated with a point of view (cigarette company funded health research) ... so, what's the truth?

Our interest as planners is to change the world, not to look for the ultimate truth (where ever this ultimate truth is, we can be sure we won't find it).

Knowledge is related to where we stand, knowledge and belief are closely inter-tied.

There is more than one kind of knowledge, who can dismiss knowledge that is based on experience, or religion?

We need to embrace a plurality of knowledges (note plural) to start a conversation on how to change the world for the better.

Principle of dialog won't go by the wayside.

We need to analyze information to understand its meaning.

To gain knowledge we need to work through the differences.

In a city with many differences we can either give up on the idea of common good and everyone can be out for themselves (pure capitalism) or work through our differences (through dialog with planners acting as facilitators). Note that this is a very different role for planning than Master Planning from on high. Example of Vancouver BC waterfront planning process = extensive resident dialog, it was not a plan dropped on the city from heaven.

Planning must be communications-based - why? It's transactive particularly if you want to add other groups to the dialog beyond the state.

Civil society is key. Friedmann hopes for innovation based on ideas coming from civil society. An analysis of needs with a democratic ethos.

Hope for a better world is to learn to live with in our means (Greece is a good example when we don't live within our means) ... this will mean substantial change in the next 50 years.

Cities will always be unjust. Rapid change always generates inequality ... fighting for the ultimately just city is a losing battle. (For example, the UN Millennial goals: only relevant for a static world, but the world is changing too rapidly for these goals, however good they are today. There will always be new inequalities.)

Patsy Healy, (Newcastle University profile) The pragmatist tradition in planning thought (2009) (abstract)

We need to change the question we ask about cities ... in planning we never have enough knowledge, we are always taking risks because we don't know the future ... we need to act on assumptions and then act again after seeing the results.

We need to be practical and we need to PRACTICE

Social learning is a step by step process, taken by different actors.

And then, suddenly, two hours had gone by ... As you can see there were so many interesting ideas it was hard to record them all accurately. I did the best I could but am sure I got some of it wrong. Feel free to add corrections or thoughts in the comments.

Cities aren't smart

Cities aren't smart, people are.

I think this is a simple point, but important to remember amidst all the Smart City hype.

Smart cities are cities where people produce and use information to make cities more livable, economically successful, socially equitable, sustainable and fun.

And, who are these people producing and using information?

This is key: they are both the traditional city leaders and everyone else.

Today, city administrations have unprecedented access to data that enables them to both improve city services and make them more efficient. An often overlooked source of this data are city residents and visitors. Many cities do not use modern IT tools to collect, analyze and use input from the public. This is a shame because people could provide very high quality information for improving the way cities operate.

In some cases city administrations are not interested in public opinion, but in many cases good IT tools to help the public communicate information to cities and for cities to automatically analyze this information have not been developed. Often cities cannot even imagine that public involvement could be done more efficiently using new media and information technology tools.

What are these tools? One important set of tools are educational media since city planning and administration are complicated. Cities can get better information and ideas if the public knows something about how the city works before providing input. (This is the main idea behind my GreenCityStreets project: teach people about public transport with the BusMeister game and provide a social network for them to submit ideas to the city government.)

Another set of tools are programs to analyze and organize the data that comes in to cities through new media channels. This means designing the public input channels so that the information can be easily summarized and described. These tools could also help improve the existing public input process (e.g. public transport complaint telephone operators). The growing use of on-line 311 systems in the USA is a good example.

No doubt there are great challenges ahead as city governments involve the public more fully in the city planning and administrative process, but change is coming. New mobile communications and information technologies are making it just a question of time. Truly smart cities will embrace this change and develop the tools needed to fully engage the public in making their cities better.

What do you think?

The Truman Show - Vienna

One of my favorite movies was The Truman Show, I thought that the plot was quite good, but also enjoyed seeing the new urbanist city Seaside Florida, the movie setting.

Anyway Oliver Hangl, the artistic director of the Vienna Complaining Choir among many other artistic projects, is doing a project this week called Kino im Kopf: Die Truman Show where the audience rides through Vienna on a streetcar (they have headphones for the soundtrack) and people on the street act out scenes from The Truman Show movie. Oliver needed extras so, along with many members of the Complaining Choir helped out. We worked at Lancaster Square (actually the Josefstadterstrasse U-Bahn - Tram stop).

Here's a photo of the people on the tram enjoying our performance. Our job was to bend down and hold our ears for the 15-seconds while the tram went by. (I had the camera balanced on my leg and just shot, so it's out of focus). More photos are on my flickr site tagged Truman Show Vienna.

EXTRA: We helped out throughout the week and on Saturday we were in the audience on the tram. The show was great and I took more photos which are also on the flickr site.

It's going on until Saturday 26 June 2010, highly recommended if you are in Vienna!

Vienna Linchpin Meetup - June 14, 2010

MuseumsQuartier Vienna from my flickr photos.

We held our Vienna Linchpin Meetup at the MuseumsQuartier. The highlight was meeting a group of people who wanted to discuss Seth Godin's ideas. On the way home I was amazed to note that three hours had passed, although the fact that they pretty much had to throw us out of the cafe should have been a hint.

We discussed a wide variety of subjects, listed below. We decided to meet again in September to continue our discussion with more people.

Can cleaning people be linchpins? We think that it's possible to bring art to cleaning and cleaners can be an important connection between people working in an office. Our model is not the outsourced cleaning companies, but rather the cleaners who were really part of the organization, like the janitors in our elementary schools in the old days (Mike Mulligan of steam shovel fame). Maybe not forever, but being a linchpin cleaner (to pay the bills) while you are doing some other art at night.


How do you transfer Seth's ideas to old businesses and institutions? An especially important question in cities like Vienna with long traditions.


Can you be a linchpin in a large business or do you need to work for yourself? Of course Seth discusses this, but it was on our minds. We felt that learning to get along in existing structures can provide you with the freedom to implement innovative ideas. But, it's a balancing act.


We should always ask, "Where's the fun?" at work. Work should be a playground where you can fail. Interestingly some organizations allow failure but sweep it under the carpet preferring to ignore it rather than learn from it.


What about colleagues to whom work is simply 8 hours plus a paycheck?


Finally, as a mixed German and English speaking group, we had a lot of fun translating and debating how to interpret Seth's work (starting with "What does linchpin mean?") in another language.

Bus Meister and BRT

Bus Meister will help citizens lobby city hall (this is Vienna) in support of public transport priority (from my flickr photos).

I just returned from a meeting in Udine (Italy) where I spoke about my Bus Meister idea of creating an integrated suite of web applications (game, social network and wiki best practices library) to help educate citizens on how to improve public transport operations (by introducing public transport priority measures) and to empower them to help actually implement these ideas. It's a general approach that I think could be used to solve many urban problems.

Going through my e-mail I was glad to read about Barcelona's new BRT lines which one of my UC Berkeley professors, Carlos Daganzo, is helping plan. The article in the ITS Berkeley News is a very good summary of for the importance of public transport priority and BRT. Daganzo is a brilliant scientist, it's great to see him working on improving public transport!

Power Point Presentations

Here's a great article by Slate's Farhad Manjoo No More Bullet Points, No More Clip Art - PowerPoint isn't evil if you learn how to use it.

Farhad summarizes how to make presentations better and mentions several of my favorite authors and bloggers including Edward Tufte and Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen). An article well worth reading and bookmarking. 

Signs and Wayfinding from Slate

From my flickr London photos set.

Julia Turner has a great series of articles on signs and wayfinding in Slate. The first article describes the importance of signs in general. The second article takes us on a tour through Penn Station in New York looking at how well (or badly) the signs work in helping us get from an entrance to the Amtrak trains. It reminds me of an experience I had in the Paris Metro Châtelet - Les Halles station in 2008.

The third article is on urban wayfinding, which Turner describes as completely different from wayfinding in transport stations or other controlled environments (e.g. Penn Station). She uses the example of Transport for London's Legible London project to describe the concept. This is a really excellent article filled with lots of good information.

The photo at the right is another solution: people at the Copenhagen Airport who help guide visitors (the other signs there are pretty good too).

The fourth article describes research on the hand-made maps made by normal people. The fifth article describes the 'war over exit signs' which includes a nice summary of the idea behind pictograms and their use on signs. The sixth article is forthcoming, but I am sure it will be good.

I have always been fascinated by signs. Here is a link to my flickr set signs and here is a link to my flickr set WC Signs ... I find wc signs to be especially interesting because they give businesses and people the ability to be creative about how they use graphics. As they say, "You can tell a lot about a place by their WC signs" ... well, at least that's what I always say.

Finally, my restaurant review of the Hallwylerhof restaurant in Zurich. They have a wonderful graphics and signage design used consistently throughout the restaurant, and the food is great too.

Games as a platform for city-scale collaboration

Here is an extremely interesting slide show by Jane McGonigal from AvantGame about the role of computer games in helping solve urban and social problems.

The BusMeister game I am developing has a similar goal, but what McGonigal is doing is fantastic. The slideshow gives a nice background on the idea.

Also check out AventGame's new game EVOKE - it's really well done.

Games as a platform for city-scale collaboration

View more presentations from avantgame.

Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors | Video on TED.com

Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors | Video on TED.com

This is a wonderful video, not just because he shows several clips featuring Vienna musicians, but because it so clearly illustrates different management styles and the art helps you distinguish what works from what doesn't. I was saving this until I really had time to watch and enjoyed it immensely.

I read about the talk on Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen blog.

Dynamic Pricing

What an interesting post by Seth Godin on dynamic pricing yesterday, here's the final line:

Technology puts a lot more pressure on your imagination and creativity, even in pricing.

Web 2.0 and California High Speed Rail Planning

TGV at Zurich Hauptbahnhof - October 2009 - from my flickr photos.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I just finished revising my TRB paper on Web 2.0 applications for improving public participation in the transportation planning process (download here: web2transport). Yesterday I was talking to someone about some of the ideas in the paper and I remembered a story I wrote in 2005 as part of a proposal for completing the Regional Rail Plan for the San Francisco Bay Area.

The story was a speech given by one of the participants in the Regional Rail Plan planning process given 25-years after completion of the California High Speed rail system. I just re-read the story and I was surprised about how good it is and how relevant so many of the points it raises are today. So, here's the link to a pdf file. As they say, sit back, relax and enjoy the trip!

San Francisco Bay Area Regional Rail Plan - A vision (2005)

(By the way, although people I talked with on the inside said that this story was an important reason for selecting the consultant team, the consultants never asked me to help with the project and I'm not sure what ever happened to the plan itself.)

Why Dilbert is Doomed

Zurich's Ingenieure Tram - encourages people to study engineering!

Here's an very interesting article from Salon by Michael Lind about jobs in the future called: Why Dilbert is Doomed. Health and education will be most in demand, and of course science/engineering will still be important.

Wiki Government by Beth Simone Noveck

Mural in Buffalo NY City Hall, from my flickr photos.

I just finished reading Wiki Government by Beth Simone Noveck. It's a great book on a critical subject and has given me many good ideas that I will integrate into my Bus Meister (soon to have a new name!) project. (Here's an article she wrote for Democracy magazine that summarizes the main concepts: Wiki Government.)

Noveck is a law professor from NY University who teaches patent law. Wiki Government showcases the a Web 2.0 application she developed to improve the US patent process. She uses this "Peer to Patent" application as a case study in the book to help analyze and explain how Web 2.0 applications can be used to improve many aspects of government work. I especially liked how she structures the problems inherent in public participation and her suggestions for improvements.

Noveck believes that citizens should be able to really collaborate with government rather than simply interact via the "anemic conception of participatory government." She proceeds to explain the problems with current public participation processes (e.g. most only allow comment on well-defined regulations and plans, and worse, generally the only ones who have the expertise and time to comment are the impacted industry and their lobbyists).

Her problems with public participation ring true to me. As a veteran of transport planning processes - from both sides of the table - I recognize that it really does not work. We did try an innovative approach in preparing the Caltrain Downtown San Francisco Extension project planning study in 1996-97 (the link takes you to a page on my website, about half way down I describe the Caltrain project).

We called the effort the Caltrain DTX Decision Options Screening (pdf of Transportation Research Board paper) process; the idea was to provide citizens with information about several different planning choices and then ask them to vote on the best decision. I think that the process worked pretty well and the citizens who participated did a good job choosing between the various options ... and that was all done with paper (pre-Internet), a much better job could be done with today's internet technologies.

However, real collaboration means more than simply voting. As Noveck says, "The bureaucrat in Washington often lacks access to the right information or to the expertise necessary to make sense of a welter of available information. This can pose a challenge to good decisionmaking and to creativity in problem solving." Again this sounds right to me. I remember reviewing information we received on a planning study from citizens and thinking, wow, it would have been great to have this information early in the planning process, not now when many of the key decisions have already been made.

Noveck makes the point that while many new technologies are being integrated into the democratic process, most of the time "The focus is on deliberation, not collaboration; on talk instead of action; on information, not decisionmaking." The book describes this problem and suggests ways to use Web 2.0 applications to help citizens collaborate effectively with government, using this input to make decisions and take appropriate actions.

I have only scratched the surface of this excellent book, but will close by listing Noveck's lessons learned (her lessons in italics, my comments following) for improving government by making better use of new technology:

1 - Ask the right questions - government needs to ask (the right) questions, not simply provide plans, regulations, etc. for comment;
2 - Ask the right people - allow people to self select based on their expertise and interests;
3 - Design the process for the desired end;
4 - Design for groups not individuals - this means break work into small logical chunks;
5 - Use the screen to show the group back to itself - Noweck spends a lot of time in the book explaining how important it is to design a good user interface that allows the group to achieve a sense of itself;
6 - Divide the work into roles and tasks - as she says, Wikipedia works because people know what to do;
7 - Harness the power of reputation - this means using techniques like digg or rating systems to recognize team members and contribution quality;
8 - Make policies, not websites - understand the process and goals before developing the website;
9 - Pilot new ideas - try things out;
10 - Focus on outcomes, not inputs - the goal is not to have lots of comments, it's to have a good end result.

Finally, if you are interested in making government and planning work better, read this book! It is an excellent introduction to an important new subject. I will certainly be incorporating some of Noveck's ideas in Bus Meister.

Grocery Store Musical

Just returned from Zurich and found this in my mailbox ... as I have written before, ImprovEverywhere makes me want to move to New York!

Improv Everywhere: NY Subway Yearbook Photos

Another great project from NY's Improv Everywhere. Why can't public transit always be this much fun?

David Bryne on Cities

I loved listening to the Talking Heads, it wasn't just the music, but that the lyrics were always (well almost always) so thought provoking. Last week, David Bryne wrote a wonderful essay on cities for the Wall Street Journal (of all places!?!?). The article David Byrnes's Perfect City is as clear and on target as his music. What a talented observer of cities and how they work. Thanks to Richard Florida and the Creative Class for the heads up. The photo above is of a sidewalk cafe in the Saint Gilles neighborhood of Brussels.

Seat Belts Turn 50

I attended Volvo's Urban Transport Conference in March and as part of the conference a group of us toured the Volvo Museum (there's my photo driving a bus). But I just learned that Nils Bohlin, an engineer at Volvo invented the three-point seat belt. The full story is in Wired's Autopia The 3-Point Seat Belt Turns 50. Bohlin and Volvo made the design freely available and according to Wired, Bohlin’s invention has been singled out by German patent registrars as one of the eight patents to have the greatest significance for humanity during the hundred years from 1885 to 1985.

Krugman on the Future

Today Paul Krugman, in his blog, links to an article he wrote in 1996 on the future. He specifically addresses the question of technology making workers obsolete. Here's the link to White Collars Turn Blue by Paul Krugman.

Curiousity

When do we become less curious?

Photo taken at the Wien Museum.

Attention to Detail: Street Signs

In Vienna, as in many European cities, street signs are often placed on the sides of buildings. Here's a photo of how the workers attached the street name sign to the scaffolding so people could still see it during construction. It's a nice attention to detail you don't see very often.