In my observations of progressive policy wonks (as we call them in Australian slang) is the absolute worst thing you can accuse them of is being ‘conservative’. They are so blind to the notion that the past is a) a useful record of things that succeeded and failed, b) people in the past are NOT morons and c) progress is only progress if it’s ‘revolutionary’ so they have to reinvent the wheel all the time to sell it… but they only talk to other progressives, otherwise they’d realise that their idea is not that revolutionary.
Example: Multigenerational households are the ‘revolutionary’ way to solve the aged care crisis! But only to people who thought it was a good idea to section off and warehouse the elderly and infirm to be cared for by ‘experts’, ie poorly paid carers on 12 hr shifts and a few doctors who couldn’t get a better offer. Meanwhile every Asian/Eastern European/Islander/ is laughing at them because they never thought it was a good idea to warehouse their elders away from families in the first place! They never used to be called ‘multigenerational households’ they used to be called families or just households.
That is just one example of how ‘progressives’ can’t admit to themselves that their ‘progressive revolution’ has actually destroyed something good and human and the attempt at engineering has failed miserably so they have to ‘progress’ with new words for a normal human activity and end up looking like idiots to normal people and conservatively dispositioned people (like me). It’s the chief reason I soured on public policy in my undergrad days and went deeper into philosophy and theory. Exasperation is one word to describe this idiotic merry go round and lack of humility to admit that sometimes the truly progressive thing to do when you’ve taken a wrong turn is to go back till you find the right road.
In most cities strip malls were located in walking distance of most neighborhoods, and served as complete local downtowns. We only needed to go all the way downtown for specialized things like banking.
Indoor malls and big boxes sucked the life out of strip malls, which now hold mostly dubious and quasi-legal stores. Maybe the movement would be easier to understand if it talked about strip malls instead of minutes.
The use of needlessly complex language is a form of signaling, of saying, “I’m a member of your group and understand its rules of the road”. This kind of signaling is wired into our DNA and it’s hard to see this changing. We may just be stuck with obscure academic jargon.
The communication difficulty you describe has been seen over and over again. A new discipline is developed, say psychology, and as new ideas emerge, a new terminology emerges alongside. This new jargon greatly facilitates communications between the practitioners of the new discipline but also totally separates them from the general public. When the early psychologists attempted to communicate with the general public, they doubtless sounded like high priests spouting mumbo jumbo.
Such chasms can be bridged in two ways — specialists can discipline themselves to communicate with the public in the popular idiom or wait until people catch up with terms like bipolar disorder, narcissism, and introvert. It is probable that the key concepts of urbanism can be explained in popular language much more easily than the manifold important concepts of psychology.
Interesting analogy, but yeah, I think it is (should be) much easier to explain urbanist ideas. My own view is that urbanism is just *people living in settlements*, that it's almost a movement or discipline by accident and at heart really isn't one at all.
Here is the problem. The attraction of inventing a new term like urbanism is that it is three words shorter than the phrase *people living in settlements.* Also, I don't see why you are uncomfortable with viewing urbanism as a movement. That's what we call people thinking about the same topic and interacting with each other about that topic and seeking to make changes in the world based on their views about the topic. The word discipline comes becomes appropriate when people are getting PHD s in the field and teaching courses like Urbanism 101.
Oh, what I mean is sort of the weirdness of an old normalcy having to sell itself as a viewpoint. Urbanism in general maybe not so much, I think it's especially weird that "housing advocacy" is a movement - where did we lose the society-wide understanding that of course housing gets built over time? In that sense I think of our goal as being to get to the point where being a movement simply becomes unnecessary.
Environmental movement and the civil rights movement are still with us decades after they began. In my view, urbanism has barely been launched by comparison.
I agree with your take here. I find it's a lot better to frame things positively in terms of the desired outcome in plain English. So, instead of "mitigating food deserts," something like "ensure everyone has access to fresh produce." Instead of some of the jargon around "urbanism" I think we can talk about neighborhood life, safe streets, affordable housing for everyone, easy access to neighborhood services, creating fun and vibrant public places, etc. Those are terms people understand and can relate to.
The only part of this I think is hard is when talking about these issues in small towns or outer suburban areas, where people have a very open bias against "cities." But in most cases if you substitute "Main Street" for "city" or "urban," then it works. Something like "My goal is that everyone who wants to should be able to afford to live with convenient access to a nice, safe, Main Street with good services available." Almost everyone agrees with that.
Count me among those who are supportive of the concept but somewhat disappointed in the way it was presented in this particular book. Some words that are central to urbanism (including URBANism itself) carry negative connotations among those who resist it. I avoid the term ‘density’ for this reason, and have come to embrace ‘proximity’ and ‘abundance.’ I recently noticed the emphasis on ‘proximity’ in articles coming out of Brookings, then became hyper-aware of its use in much earlier books and writings. Transportation scholar Susan Handy described the same concept in a very readable article (“Highway Blues: Nothing a Little Accessibility Can’t Cure”) published thirty years ago, but her use of the term ‘accessibility’ might be confusing today to those who associate that with universal design. As Addison so often reminds us, the way we frame ideas and our choice of words to do so play a big role in achieving widespread acceptance.
Unfortunately the term is so tainted now that we should just scrap it altogether. Just call it Traditional City or something. No point in trying to rehabilitate the term, we just need the ideas.
Plain language comes up in content strategy discussions for my clients regularly. I wonder at what reading level these concepts should be shared to a wide audience.
This piece is one of the funniest samples of urbanist confession I've read. Good for a healthy crackup. Anything that must be pulled apart by lexical tweezers and held apart by semantic clamps probably fails the stress test.
I agree with you about the downsides of jargon. However, I think that trying to speak in a manner that is fool proof against vandalism by the American right is a fool’s errand. Folks like Christopher Rufo have perfected the tactic of redefining any term they choose by turning it into a garbage can that holds a bunch of things that folks on the right hate. The 15-minute City is only one example.
I don’t think that describing the concept of 15 minute cities as simultaneously “old” and “new” is incoherent or confusing. I think it’s accurate. It’s new because it’s new to most of us, because most of us grew up in car-dependent cities. It’s old because it was normal for most of human history. That’s easy to understand.
In fact, I would go so far to say that this is a very good way to present the concept. It says, “this idea that might seem new and unattainable is actually traditional and we could easily return to it.”
I don’t think the fact that certain people view 15 minute cities as sinister is because supporters have failed to communicate it well. It has been communicated just fine. Those people view it as sinister because they are attached to the status quo and are automatically opposed to anything they perceive as coming from the left, and they will be opposed to it no matter how well it is communicated.
Maybe? But I've had people say to me, basically, "I agree with urbanism but not this 15-minute city stuff." What you wrote: "this idea that might seem new and unattainable is actually traditional and we could easily return to it" - has more clarity than anything in the book! That's a good way to put it, but you're improving on the presentation there.
Truthfully, I haven’t read the book, so you know better than me. Maybe the book is that bad. But opponents aren’t reading that book, so I don’t think the book is that important. My phrasing is just a paraphrasing of the definition I have absorbed from the blogosphere/social media/miscellaneous articles. Basically, I was introduced to the concept the same way anti-15-minute-cites people were. The difference is that I was predisposed to like it and they were predisposed to hate it.
I have not read the book, so I have no comment on that. Intelligibility induces belief, or so I hope. I agree with your expectation that our allies should listen to criticism better and use critiques as opportunities to improve their communications. While it's true that sometimes people will believe whatever gobble-dee-gook that socially desirable people believe, this is limited as a strategy for building an enduring movement. The Victorian reform movement is an example of one which built a conceptually coherent moral program, and I argue that we are entrenched in some of the fundamental social environments of their aspirations. We will need to be equally coherent to overcome it. Building such a movement requires convincing people who are not inclined to believe us and don't like us very much; that is, as long as they are listening in good faith.
In my observations of progressive policy wonks (as we call them in Australian slang) is the absolute worst thing you can accuse them of is being ‘conservative’. They are so blind to the notion that the past is a) a useful record of things that succeeded and failed, b) people in the past are NOT morons and c) progress is only progress if it’s ‘revolutionary’ so they have to reinvent the wheel all the time to sell it… but they only talk to other progressives, otherwise they’d realise that their idea is not that revolutionary.
Example: Multigenerational households are the ‘revolutionary’ way to solve the aged care crisis! But only to people who thought it was a good idea to section off and warehouse the elderly and infirm to be cared for by ‘experts’, ie poorly paid carers on 12 hr shifts and a few doctors who couldn’t get a better offer. Meanwhile every Asian/Eastern European/Islander/ is laughing at them because they never thought it was a good idea to warehouse their elders away from families in the first place! They never used to be called ‘multigenerational households’ they used to be called families or just households.
That is just one example of how ‘progressives’ can’t admit to themselves that their ‘progressive revolution’ has actually destroyed something good and human and the attempt at engineering has failed miserably so they have to ‘progress’ with new words for a normal human activity and end up looking like idiots to normal people and conservatively dispositioned people (like me). It’s the chief reason I soured on public policy in my undergrad days and went deeper into philosophy and theory. Exasperation is one word to describe this idiotic merry go round and lack of humility to admit that sometimes the truly progressive thing to do when you’ve taken a wrong turn is to go back till you find the right road.
In most cities strip malls were located in walking distance of most neighborhoods, and served as complete local downtowns. We only needed to go all the way downtown for specialized things like banking.
Indoor malls and big boxes sucked the life out of strip malls, which now hold mostly dubious and quasi-legal stores. Maybe the movement would be easier to understand if it talked about strip malls instead of minutes.
I'm all for seeing "urbanism" in a form other than the traditional city!
The use of needlessly complex language is a form of signaling, of saying, “I’m a member of your group and understand its rules of the road”. This kind of signaling is wired into our DNA and it’s hard to see this changing. We may just be stuck with obscure academic jargon.
The communication difficulty you describe has been seen over and over again. A new discipline is developed, say psychology, and as new ideas emerge, a new terminology emerges alongside. This new jargon greatly facilitates communications between the practitioners of the new discipline but also totally separates them from the general public. When the early psychologists attempted to communicate with the general public, they doubtless sounded like high priests spouting mumbo jumbo.
Such chasms can be bridged in two ways — specialists can discipline themselves to communicate with the public in the popular idiom or wait until people catch up with terms like bipolar disorder, narcissism, and introvert. It is probable that the key concepts of urbanism can be explained in popular language much more easily than the manifold important concepts of psychology.
Interesting analogy, but yeah, I think it is (should be) much easier to explain urbanist ideas. My own view is that urbanism is just *people living in settlements*, that it's almost a movement or discipline by accident and at heart really isn't one at all.
Here is the problem. The attraction of inventing a new term like urbanism is that it is three words shorter than the phrase *people living in settlements.* Also, I don't see why you are uncomfortable with viewing urbanism as a movement. That's what we call people thinking about the same topic and interacting with each other about that topic and seeking to make changes in the world based on their views about the topic. The word discipline comes becomes appropriate when people are getting PHD s in the field and teaching courses like Urbanism 101.
Oh, what I mean is sort of the weirdness of an old normalcy having to sell itself as a viewpoint. Urbanism in general maybe not so much, I think it's especially weird that "housing advocacy" is a movement - where did we lose the society-wide understanding that of course housing gets built over time? In that sense I think of our goal as being to get to the point where being a movement simply becomes unnecessary.
Environmental movement and the civil rights movement are still with us decades after they began. In my view, urbanism has barely been launched by comparison.
I agree with your take here. I find it's a lot better to frame things positively in terms of the desired outcome in plain English. So, instead of "mitigating food deserts," something like "ensure everyone has access to fresh produce." Instead of some of the jargon around "urbanism" I think we can talk about neighborhood life, safe streets, affordable housing for everyone, easy access to neighborhood services, creating fun and vibrant public places, etc. Those are terms people understand and can relate to.
The only part of this I think is hard is when talking about these issues in small towns or outer suburban areas, where people have a very open bias against "cities." But in most cases if you substitute "Main Street" for "city" or "urban," then it works. Something like "My goal is that everyone who wants to should be able to afford to live with convenient access to a nice, safe, Main Street with good services available." Almost everyone agrees with that.
Count me among those who are supportive of the concept but somewhat disappointed in the way it was presented in this particular book. Some words that are central to urbanism (including URBANism itself) carry negative connotations among those who resist it. I avoid the term ‘density’ for this reason, and have come to embrace ‘proximity’ and ‘abundance.’ I recently noticed the emphasis on ‘proximity’ in articles coming out of Brookings, then became hyper-aware of its use in much earlier books and writings. Transportation scholar Susan Handy described the same concept in a very readable article (“Highway Blues: Nothing a Little Accessibility Can’t Cure”) published thirty years ago, but her use of the term ‘accessibility’ might be confusing today to those who associate that with universal design. As Addison so often reminds us, the way we frame ideas and our choice of words to do so play a big role in achieving widespread acceptance.
Unfortunately the term is so tainted now that we should just scrap it altogether. Just call it Traditional City or something. No point in trying to rehabilitate the term, we just need the ideas.
Plain language comes up in content strategy discussions for my clients regularly. I wonder at what reading level these concepts should be shared to a wide audience.
This piece is one of the funniest samples of urbanist confession I've read. Good for a healthy crackup. Anything that must be pulled apart by lexical tweezers and held apart by semantic clamps probably fails the stress test.
I agree with you about the downsides of jargon. However, I think that trying to speak in a manner that is fool proof against vandalism by the American right is a fool’s errand. Folks like Christopher Rufo have perfected the tactic of redefining any term they choose by turning it into a garbage can that holds a bunch of things that folks on the right hate. The 15-minute City is only one example.
I don’t think that describing the concept of 15 minute cities as simultaneously “old” and “new” is incoherent or confusing. I think it’s accurate. It’s new because it’s new to most of us, because most of us grew up in car-dependent cities. It’s old because it was normal for most of human history. That’s easy to understand.
In fact, I would go so far to say that this is a very good way to present the concept. It says, “this idea that might seem new and unattainable is actually traditional and we could easily return to it.”
I don’t think the fact that certain people view 15 minute cities as sinister is because supporters have failed to communicate it well. It has been communicated just fine. Those people view it as sinister because they are attached to the status quo and are automatically opposed to anything they perceive as coming from the left, and they will be opposed to it no matter how well it is communicated.
Maybe? But I've had people say to me, basically, "I agree with urbanism but not this 15-minute city stuff." What you wrote: "this idea that might seem new and unattainable is actually traditional and we could easily return to it" - has more clarity than anything in the book! That's a good way to put it, but you're improving on the presentation there.
Truthfully, I haven’t read the book, so you know better than me. Maybe the book is that bad. But opponents aren’t reading that book, so I don’t think the book is that important. My phrasing is just a paraphrasing of the definition I have absorbed from the blogosphere/social media/miscellaneous articles. Basically, I was introduced to the concept the same way anti-15-minute-cites people were. The difference is that I was predisposed to like it and they were predisposed to hate it.
I have not read the book, so I have no comment on that. Intelligibility induces belief, or so I hope. I agree with your expectation that our allies should listen to criticism better and use critiques as opportunities to improve their communications. While it's true that sometimes people will believe whatever gobble-dee-gook that socially desirable people believe, this is limited as a strategy for building an enduring movement. The Victorian reform movement is an example of one which built a conceptually coherent moral program, and I argue that we are entrenched in some of the fundamental social environments of their aspirations. We will need to be equally coherent to overcome it. Building such a movement requires convincing people who are not inclined to believe us and don't like us very much; that is, as long as they are listening in good faith.
Derek Thompson's podcast is called "Plain English"