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Yakshaving Chronicles: Our Community Bikes

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Flotsam and Jetsam, Ideas | tagged as , , , , ,

Our Community Bikes is a great concept. Conveniently located a quick 10 minute walk away from where I live between Fairview and Mount Pleasant here in Vancouver, it is essentially one-part bike parts recycler and seller, one-part bike tool sharing workshop, and one part roving bike maintenance skills class. Their model is essentially that they have some bike stands, and you can choose one of three ways to pay for your time in their worksop: $5 an hour if you don’t need any assistance, $10 if you’re only getting verbal advice, and $15 if you’re getting detailed hands-on instruction (with a $50 option if you hand them your bike and say, “Fix it, please!”).

I bought my current bike at OCB. I love the bike. I learned a few things when I got it to start fixing it up, like putting in a fresh set of ball bearings on the wheels, new tubes, and some fidgety things with the gears. Just the basics, nothing overly fancy, though given I was learning from scratch and am not a nuts-and-bolts tinkering type, it probably took me a lot longer than it might take many other people. But I’d be lying if I said the experience was all cakewalk and roses.

I’m far from blaming OCB solely for the unpleasantness of my experiences. As a non-profit, I can say with some confidence that they are likely understaffed and overworked; but they are generally good humoured and encouraging about it, and as helpful as they can be. But it’s pretty much hellish everytime I go, and part of writing this post is to diagnose why that is.

I went today because my bike tube suffered a puncture and I wanted to get an opinion on what to do about it. Looking at the tube this morning, it was clear from the indentations that it’d been weakened through contact with the spokes. The rim tape on my wheel is quite thin (and I had put it on myself at OCB when I first bought the bike), so I figured I’d hop by and get an opinion on whether I should replace the tube, and what to do about the rim tape.

So I hopped over, signed in, and asked for that quick opinion, which was to put on what I think is called a rim protector. I was handed something that looked like a giant red rubber band, and verbally instructed on how to put it on the wheel. OK. A few minutes into trying to do this, I noticed that the protector seemed to be really way too small for my wheel. I brought this up with a second staff person, who quickly replied me that it was supposed to be tight-fitting. But this was ridiculous — I felt like I’d have to break the laws of physics to get this thing on. Meanwhile, I was getting my fingers painfully pinched between the wheel and the rim protector, getting frustrated, and feeling stupid because I was doing something I disagreed with. It was probably around this point that I tweeted:


How do I keep from feeling utterly victimized every time I go to our community bikes???less than a minute ago via txtKaren Quinn Fung
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I’m aware that I have a well-documented problem with asking for help, so doing this helped wake me up to the fact that I really did need help, and found someone who looked unbusy and asked for it. One staff member tried to get it (the rim protector) on with me; it wasn’t working. A second staff member (the one who’d told me it was supposed to be this way) finally committed to helping me get it on. Armed with two screwdrivers, we did it — but it was all twisted and folded as a result. She suggested I use some needlenose pliers to fix it. I spent another 10 minute trying to do that. Meanwhile, the staff are occasionally mentioning why they’d chose the rim protector — the shop didn’t have tape the width of my wheel. Then the first staff member, the one who’d suggested the rim protector, took a look at the wheel and took off the badly-aligned rim protector.  The rim protector was now ruined, and he took it off the wheel because it was clearly the wrong size.

…Oh. You mean like I first thought 30 minutes before that?

He ended up putting another layer of rim tape on top of the rim tape I’d put on last year. I bought a new tube since the old one was clearly weakening in a number of spots due to the spokes. And then I finished and paid up, an hour after I’d signed in and a lot longer than I’d intended to be there.

Check the wording of that tweet up there again. Who’s the actor in that question? ME. I should emphasize: I do not feel that Our Community Bikes is necessarily at fault for me feeling victimized. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that they can improve on, but I endeavour to take responsibility for making sure that the things I think and act keep me from feeling this way. My reading of this particular situation is that I lacked the confidence in my own assessment of the rim protector situation to respond to the second staff member to go, “No really, it’s not just tight, it’s wrong.” And so ensued another 20 minutes of trying to get it on.

So that’s why I feel victimized when I go to OCB — because yes, I am a beginner, and yes, there are a lot of things I don’t know how to do, but no, I’m not stupid, and I usually make things worse when I allow myself to act or think that I am, which somehow gets really easy to do when I’m there. I genuinely lack confidence in my ability to do many of the tasks — for instance, I needed a reminder on how to put the tire and tube back on the wheel. Because I do this once a year, so my hands and my brain are going to forget. But where’s the middle ground between the correct amount of support and autonomy? My learned helplessness in this area is strong, as this also affects how I interact with my brother in this too. I could probably get more Foucaldian about this, but there’s got to be a way of doing this so that the fact that I lack the knowledge or the skill to correctly apply it doesn’t cause me to shrivel up and sap my value as a human being.

I would just like to be able to go to OCB just once and not leave every time without fail feeling lucky I hadn’t burst into tears. I don’t have an issue with spending hours on end trying to install ledger using MacPorts on my Powerbook, so I don’t think it’s an issue of me across the board not being able to tinker with things in order to figure them out — yet being in that place regularly makes me feel stupid. I cook and I sometimes draw and make things with my hands, so I don’t think it’s just a matter of not being comfortable with getting my hands on it, even if I do have to say “righty-tight lefty-loosey” once in a while. Perhaps I’m just not being patient with the fact that things take a really long time, coupled with anxiety about breaking it, and the diluted attention of how few people are there. It generally feels way more dignified to learn with the book my brother gave me at home. I don’t think that has to be like that.

I think there’s a base level of skills with how things work that you need to have in order to feel comfortable participating in the learning. And I don’t have it (yet). And some people don’t have that base level of comfort with cooking, or computers. These are all tasks that people routinely excuse themselves from and can make other people almost cry. So fixing my bike in that particular place is mine.

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Northern Voice 2010: From Tweets to Plans panel reflections

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts, Featured, Ideas, Technology | tagged as , , , , , ,

At this year’s Northern Voice, I was grateful to have been given the chance to moderate a panel, titled, “From Tweets to Plans: Online Conversations for Urban Planning.” I’d gotten the idea to do it from being invited to the SCARP Symposium by PlanningPool, where I found myself talking about blogging to urban planners, and wondered how it would be like to do the oppose: to talk urban planning with bloggers.

This was my first time moderating a panel, and there was also a bit of an “X” factor with Northern Voice: this year’s conference was so much bigger than previously, and the schedule had been re-jigged so that there wasn’t a MooseCamp day, which is a format that I’ve discovered I’m much more comfortable with. The part I find most fun about that format is that it’s interactive, which means I get a much better sense of what the people in the room are interested and want to know, and they’re encouraged to ask questions right upfront.

I was glad to have asked at the beginning of the panel who had attended the Government 2.0 panel, because I was pleasantly surprised by how little overlap there was. In hindsight, if there were more time, I probably would also have tried to get a better sense in the room of how much experience people had with what urban planning is. Because it’s huge! It encompasses and touches so many aspects of daily life that for all I knew, one person thinks it has to do with zoning and permits and taxes, and someone else is thinking about architecture.

I did feel good about having provided a bit of the perspective I think I share with the panelists, which is the idea of planning as the mortar, if you will, between the major bricks of city building, filling in the gaps to try and make it cohesive for citizens, aka users of the city. Engineers, architects, social planners, economists, advocates, politicians — planners have the potential to take the lead in visioning an outcome to get the pieces to sit right using information available.

My choice of panelists was hampered by one thing: befitting an online operation, only one person from the PlanningPool editorial team was in Vancouver during Northern Voice, and she wasn’t available for Friday. That meant Daniella had to come in through Skype. The room set-up, thinking back, kinda stunk. Both video and audio were quite choppy and I could see many straining to hear her — and combined with a non-specialized microphone, I think it was pretty much impossible for many, which is a shame because she had such interesting things to say. Despite me working every last UBC connection I had in order to ensure I had a wired connection for the room, it turned out I was sharing with the live video streaming, and it didn’t work. The other lesson for me, I think, is if there’s a Skype presenter involved, don’t make them the first panelist.

One thing that set my panel apart from many others was that I invited people who probably had less experience blogging than most other speakers, but who had more (or a more specific type of) experience aside from blogging, and every one of the panelists was doing it in a way that didn’t have as much to do on personal blogging — a subtle but important distinction at Northern Voice. Even though sessions like Darren Barefoot’s on social change may be significant for him in a professional context, he was still focused on how it related to individuals’ use of social media (take the in-house Facebook example). All three of my panelists were blogging in a community context — a community of professionals, citizens with certain interests, or an imagined general public.

Online Community Building for Offline Issues

There was one suggestion from the audience from Mike Klassen to PlanningPool, to “channel [their] inner Kunstler.” CityCaucus go into further depth about their comment in their blog post. First off, it probably flew over the heads of at least a few people in the room except the panelists and a few others, and even though this came at the very end, it probably called for an explanation. James Howard Kunstler is known in urban planning for being quite brash and provocative in furthering his hatred of  urban sprawl, the inhumanity of car-centric lifestyles and his pessimism towards the doomsday scenario presented by peak oil and climate change. The above comment essentially amounted to encouraging PlanningPool to write in a more forward and perhaps controversial fashion, as a suggestion for increasing traffic and comments.

There are many schools of thought on whether this is in fact the way to go about changing people’s minds, rooted in differing conceptions of how social change happens, theories of power and how we conduct ourselves on the Internet.

There’s also a very compelling technology question that comes into it as well, which has to do with Daniella’s statement that pieces tend to get a lot more involvement with authors post links to pieces on Facebook. As a planning student as well as someone interested in technology, I’m extremely sensitive to what kind of an impression I leave online, and I think most of the students in my program are too — though that may be more out of habit than thoughtfulness. There may not be an awareness of what’s qualitatively different about posting a fully identified and attributed comment to PlanningPool — an open, Google-indexed forum — rather than just commenting on Facebook, where comments are more likely to circle around peer groups. So I think there’s a technology literacy piece to encouraging planners in training.

As for being more Kunstler-esque, I can’t speak for the PlanningPool folks but I know for myself I’ve been inflammatory on the Internet more than enough for one lifetime to never want to do it again. Doing it for the sake of prompting discussion strikes me as running the risk of being oversimplistic, reductionist and possibly manipulative. That said, I’m not very good at intentionally pissing people off offline either, which some might argue is part of the problem — after all, plenty of people are more than happy to piss me off.

Thanks again to Daniella, Andrew and Jessica for stepping up and being great sports in the discussion; Roland for moderating; and everyone who gave their time in attending. All in all, I’m happy with it and hope to have a chance to engage deeper in the issues brought up in this panel. If you attended the panel at Northern Voice, what do you think could have made it better, or how else would you have wanted to see the question of urban planning broached? I’d love to hear your thoughts either in the comments.

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Municipal government correspondence on websites enables efficient sharing

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts, Technology | tagged as , , , , ,

Pete Quily directed me to a recent story in the Georgia Straight about West Vancouver’s opening up of Council Correspondence (this is their correspondence page for 2010) on their website. Charlie Smith, the author of the article, calls for all Metro Vancouver municipalities to follow suit, in making their interactions with everyone open and available.

There are a few things that are interesting to me about this move. Firstly, I think it’s a great idea. Smith also calls for TransLink to do it. It’s not too far off from some of the suggestions Roland and I batted around on video in TransLinked episode 1. Although the motivation greatly varies, the basic idea is that same: instead of having our collective correspondence go into a virtual black hole,  where we speculate to its place in the queue and we may or may not get a response in the end, why not have the answers to those questions and suggestions of our fellow citizens incorporated into the general pool of knowledge for everybody who’s thinking, experiencing or concluding similar things? Then we would have a a way to look that sort of thing up, as well as to show either consistency (or inconsistency, or evolution) in Council’s responses.

That said, there’s something to be said for execution. Council’s correspondence appears to consist of letters scanned into a PDF image with no selectable text in weekly batches. Names and emails are whited out — unless the person indicates themselves to be representing an organization (it seems). There’s even a couple of “Page intentionally left blank”’s in there. Aside from being kind of annoying on the eyes to read, this does kind of render one of the previously mentioned benefits of doing this kind of thing useless: these PDFs can’t be indexed by Google, or searched using any of the tools in our newfangled computer machine-things.

For example: if I wanted to follow a councillor’s responses through the months and weeks on any given topic — especially, say, if I were wondering whether I should vote for them based on their record for supporting Issue That Matters to Me — I would essentially have to look at it with my naked eye, or worse, print it out and have a party with some like-minded friends.

While I think this is an excellent step and speaks highly of West Vancouver’s commitment to nurturing the relationship between their elected officials and constituents, I think this could be made 10 times cooler, especially if this means some civil staffer doesn’t have to print out the correspondence, go nuts with the white out, then scan the letters back in. We could then run fun analytics on the correspondence, such as:

  • total volume per issue category
  • total volume per councillor
  • monthly average over the course of the year (to find out which is the slowest month for a councillor’s inbox?)

Honestly, unless councillors are running emacs bbdb or CRM software, I wonder if they even know this much about their own email behaviour. (Can someone who’s worked for a politician enlighten me, perhaps?)

Pete also posted a comment to the article, calling for a system which would allow tracking how our councillors vote on issues. I think it would be rad to see, and possibly involve some crazy hacking-mojo that includes those voting buttons and meeting facilitation lights built into the wood-paneled sitting area for each councillor. I don’t know how old that system is, but I will bet you a beer it’s proprietary, closed, with perhaps some great integration to Microsoft Word.1

I also noticed that TransLink’s Drew Snider commented that TransLink has “something like this,” to which he refers the Buzzer blog and the bulletin-board system set-up for their public study for the UBC Line. Questions get posted and answered publicly on both. While I think TransLink has made some great strides and I think the Buzzer blog is a great example of a consistent online presence for a transit agency, I would say open council correspondence would be more akin to turning the Customer Inquiries e-mail address into a Get Satisfaction website — where people can not only ask questions, but hear about ideas or describe problems and, most interestingly, collaborate on possible diagnoses, workarounds and long-term solutions. Which is a little harder for transit agencies than software, granted, but no less empowering for those suffering because as a result of those issues and difficulties.

1: As an aside, there’s such an awesome ’60s BatMan the TV Show aesthetic. In fact, Adam West and Gregor kinda look alike from a certain angle…

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Northern Voice 2010 — Location, mysteries, and making visible

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Four dimensions, Technology | tagged as , , , , , , ,

…and 48 hours later, Northern Voice for 2010 is a wrap. Thanks to the hard work of all the organizers, who pulled off an incredible conference once again. This was my first year as a non-Moosecamp speaker. It was also the it was held not during reading week (owing to the Vancouver Olympics) and in the Life Sciences Centre — in most ways a worthy successor to the comforting expanses of the Forest Sciences Centre, the venue for previous iterations of Northern Voice.

There’s a lot to unpack, but I’m going to try and keep it brief for once.

  • Bryan Alexander’s keynote looked at fear and reactionary hysteria in interpreting encounters and developments of the Internet and the importance of mystery in storytelling. I think there’s never been a time for keeping your Erving Goffman at the front of one’s mind: social media is another stage to present off of. What is broadcasted is at least as often as not, a purposefully composed front. There’s a danger that we might stop nurturing the self that lies beyond the glimpses one sees on social media, letting the image masquerade as all. We are not our output; that makes us worthy of the real life meetings that social media ideally facilitate. I enjoyed the range of ominous voices and tones Bryan employed to get his point across in mockery and heightening drama.
  • David Ng’s session called “Good Science: It Takes a Village” was great. He tells the story of capturing that feeling of learning cool scientific facts and trying to approximate it and expose children to it in a way that makes them as familiar with the real world as the branded creations the corporations have poured so much money into addicting our youngest on. That’s the impetus behind Phylogame, a crowd-sourced trading card game with facts about real animals, with complex game-play rules and featuring art, all made lovingly over the Internet. One thing I keep close at hand: science isn’t necessarily free of agendas, but there is a systematic process and attempt at reasoned dialogue around it; but perhaps the particularities of those conversations, happening through letters or published articles or at professional conferences, don’t explain very well how it goes from scientific consensus to policy recommendation, and it can get as scrappy/dirty as any other attempt for power.
  • Chris Messina’s keynote on the open web weaved his personal stories of high school web development with warnings about the risks of a closed and unadvocated Internet, with the mechanics of our personal lives left at the happenstantial whim of default Facebook privacy settings. He spoke of the risks of limiting the generativity of the web, which has given us wonderful, unexpected and envelope pushing things, and the risk we run of having the Internet turned into a passive appliance, WebTV style. I’m a much bigger fan of Chris’ tone in his keynote than others who have tried to make the point, which I find too dismissive of the real hurdles faced by people who want to get things done but no longer have vast swaths of time to while away on gaining confidence in noodling with technology. Chris had it dialed back slightly, but still pointy and poignant. My idea coming out of this? Instead of getting the devs at Facebook to drive our single-login dreams, let’s get the fine developers of Dreamwidth to think about it — with a predominantly female developer base, I think there’s huge potential for leadership in that crowd for technology that’s both respectful of social boundaries yet useful in promoting management and control befitting how we all want our lives to mesh with tech.
  • I admit to a bit of poor form during the location-aware services session — I spent it getting caught up in my own questions about its relationship to urbanism. The presenters did seem interested in when I asked them about it afterwards, but was a little too frazzled by the rest of the conference to make that interaction meaningful. Nobody’s fault, I just have niche interests.
  • Weighing in at greater length on NV10 Babygeddon — as I tweeted, I personally find the inclusion of children at Northern Voice utterly refreshing, and I think a lot of that has to do with what members of the Northern Voice community think and want the Northern Voice conference to be. I  find that as a personal blogging conference, it’s not like most others, which present a more corporate, business-focused front. If Northern Voice is about communities and the rich lives of the individuals helping to build those communities — and I’m judging the sessions on writing voices and sex lives to be a nod in that direction — I think being inclusive is equally as important as giving people’s money’s worth, even with the occasional cooing during a keynote. I don’t think many are arguing against this, but more about where to draw the line when other attendees find it disruptive. On the flipside, there are some sessions, like Nancy White’s, where I think the presence of children entirely enhances it (in meaningful ways that dogs might not). I think I’m mostly just amazed at how strongly worded people’s statements on this topic are and how clearly those comments are not the highest expression of their humanity — no doubt aided by Twitter’s favoring of jumping to conclusions, quick wit and catty wordplay.

Reflections on my own panel to come. Congrats again to the volunteer organizers for pulling off another enjoyable and gorgeous conference! Great food, excellent setting.

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My Northern Voice 2010 Itinerary

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts, Ideas | tagged as , , ,

Northern Voice is just about upon us! As usual, the schedule is absolutely packed with unbelievable sessions…too many to choose from, even!

I’m also interested to see how the dynamic changes as a result of there being no MooseCamp day and the fact that the Atrium will be programmed with the Social Media Buffet. It’s a great idea — a one-stop shop to talk to a bunch of people with a bunch of different perspective and skill sets, and gets those people in more one-on-one settings than presenting might. That said, I do like that it’s going on for a good 90 minutes, and not restricted to anything less. It makes it a little less intimidating… just a little…given that that’s all going on during the panel I’ll be moderating (!).

So, what’s in store for me during Northern Voice? Here’s a random sampling of sessions you can expect me to be at:

  • The Government 2.0 session
  • David Ng’s presentation about his work on “talking science.” I think it is key to being able to bring in practitioners and community members into any endeavor with an academic angle, and just making heady and important topics accessible. (That said, I do constantly need to remind myself that science and technology are two geekily separate and different things.)
  • Monica Hamburg and Dave Olson’s session on Finding Your Online Voice looks interesting, and they are both great at conveying their personalities online. I might have to poke my  head out to take a gander at the Teaching and Social Media session…or maybe I’ll be able to swap notes as I bet I will have some friends attending as well.
  • And the open web geek in me will probably drag me to Zak Greant’s lightning talk on Mozilla Drumbeat, even though I’m sure the session on finding love online will be lots of fun.
  • I don’t think I’ll be able to stay away from Nancy White’s session on making things visible. She’s just so much fun at every session she leads. I will have to remember to bring my markers on Saturday.
  • I’m intrigued by Jeremy Osborn and Ajay Masala Puri’s session on Social Media and Social Justice…it has the glamourous time of last session of the second day, but I’m sure they’ll bring energy to power the rest of us through it!

That said, there is a heck of a lot of other cool stuff going on, so early shouts out to the audio and video team who will be making all of that accessible to those who cannot be in multiple places at once.

And last, but not least, I’m super-stoked to be moderating a panel on these topics that are so dear to me — blogging, urban planning and neighbourhood issues. I hope I’ll get to say hi to lots of you even if it doesn’t work out! I’ll be keeping track of any notes people take or post-conference conversation related to this topic at this page in the Northern Voice wiki and link to the videos when they are made available.

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CMHA’s Mental Health Week 2010

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Flotsam and Jetsam, Ideas | tagged as , ,

Reading Raul’s post over at Hummingbird604, I thought I’d take a quick moment to write in support of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Mental Health Week, happening May 3rd to 7th.

It’s interesting that once we become aware of and acknowledge this aspect of our experience, we see the effects and impacts of mental health everywhere. It’s every bit as elemental as what you are eating, the quality of the air you breathe, the parts of your blood — especially for anyone working in a field where one’s state of mind counts for anything, and I would pretty much include any job involving a computer or other people in that category.

I sometimes joke with my friends that I went back into a master’s program for the free counselling. While it’s not entirely true — I surely hope my interest in planning, my long-term goals, the supportive encouragement from important people in my life, and past positive experiences all have something to do with it too! — I can say without a doubt that knowing counselling services are available to help me out during the huge undertaking of graduate education (or any post-secondary education, period) is more than a little bit comforting. For the fellow students in my life, I’ve regularly encouraged them to make use of those counselling services should the need surface, even if that system can be a bit daunting. Mood disorders count — I’m agnostic as to the nature versus nurture bit. Whether we learned it or it’s a pattern more deeply embedded, if we need help, we need it.

A friend of mine has recently borne witness to the enormous consequences of what can happen if for one reason or another someone doesn’t get the help they need for their mental health difficulties. The strength required to say, “I need help,” is enormous. The obstacles to living and believing that “I can make a different and better life for myself,” are huge, especially when other people (friends, families, employers/employees, etc.) are involved. It is so easy to let any of the other billion motives and details get in the way. I have a lot to learn in helping nurture my own attentiveness to these matters in my daily behaviour, but I’m also happy to say awareness is probably the most difficult first step, and that almost no one in my life has actively refused to learn or listen about why this is important.

Some friends in Toronto will be putting on Toronto’s first Mental Health Camp at the end of the month. Raul and Isabella will also be putting on a second Vancouver Mental Health Camp in July. Both events examine mental health and social media. I think it’s a fascinating topic — as social media follows our lives, thoughts and movements, we also live our major life events — deaths, illnesses, losses and other hardships — in social media as well, as well as celebrating our joys, major and minor victories, and periods of growth. How do the architecture of those tools privilege or favour some forms of expression over others? And how does the evolution and future of privacy online figure into things, even as we attempt to re-shape societal stigmas around mental health?

Here’s to everybody doing what we have to. I’ll also take a moment to draw attention to the work a friend of mine in Toronto. For the past year or so, he has been doing his bit to help others “stay sane in this crazy world,” as he puts it, through his Life Habits podcast. It’s great listening and I often keep an episode or two lying around in my iPod for those times when it feels like I need to spend an extra moment think about a particular aspect of my experience.

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Northern Voice 2010 Panel Preview — From Tweets to Plans: Online Conversation for Urban Planning

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts, Featured, Ideas, Scholarship

I’m happy to have the opportunity to moderate a panel bridging two worlds of practice that I think are going to be increasingly interested in each other: urban planning and online publishing.

The organizers for Northern Voice, Vancouver’s annual blogging conference have switched things up this year, opting for two full conference days rather than their usual one day each unconference-programmed session combination, and I’m grateful to them for accepting my session, titled “From Tweets to Plans: Online Conversation for Urban Planning.”

The vision for this panel had its origins in the panel I had the chance to participate in with Nancy Pepper, Vanessa Kay and Frances Bula at the SCARP Symposium on Resilience back in March. Northern Voice’s audience means that, instead of talking blogging at a planning conference, this time we are talking planning at a blogging conference.

Like last time, the temptation is always there to trot out the examples of neat web apps that show how things are not being done business as usual. At the SCARP Symposium I started with the big ideas and moved to the examples, and I got some feedback that this may have been better reversed. I think this will also be helpful as a narrative mirroring my own story of how I got interested in planning, even as I too am chipping away at the ideas to get at the heart of what planning actually is.

While professions such as public relations and marketing have been very directly impacted by the increasing numbers of people blogging and tweeting, the connection to urban planning isn’t perhaps as obvious — people talking online doesn’t seem like it’s going to change the way we pour concrete or make decisions on where and how we work with space. But it changes the way people interact with each other around the things they want from life — and at the bottom of it is, this what cities are for. I’m glad to get have three people on this panel with different perspectives and areas of experience:

I’ve been wowed by each of these panelists in my work and interactions with them, and am looking forward to hearing their stories of how blogging can or already is shifting how we make ideas reality in our cities, and how we negotiate what’s in our plans versus what hits the ground. In fact, I can anticipate that the challenge of this panel will be to keep it on a single topic — there’s so much to be said on this topic really, from work on open government, social networking, and online organizing around causes, to hyperlocal blogging and the use of blogging in/for politics and advocacy work. At the same time, City Hall — what we typically associate with ‘planning activity’ — generally remains, for most part, an impassable black box.

That said, a huge part of this panel, of course, is YOU — whether you are going to make it to Northern Voice here in Vancouver or not. Do you have any stories to share about how the public, planning professionals and others involved in the planning process are can use blogging to get things done in different ways? Is there anything you’d be curious to learn or hear about?

(I can’t promise to squish everything into 30 minutes, but do leave a comment if you have a thought, and we can try and continue the conversation online!)

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What is a Planner? A: Managing outcomes and processes

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Scholarship | tagged as , ,

Those of you who’ve read through my posts for the last few months can tell, I think about what it means to be a planner a lot. I’m afforded the luxury of spending time on this, as a student, and I’m going to start keeping track of this stuff as I read it, because there will come a day when I don’t get to do this, and at that point I may or may not be doing planning-related work.

I’ll kick it off with this excellent quote I used in my recent presentation for my final paper on Transdisciplinary Action Research for Planning Healthy Schools. (Incidentally, that presentation was done remotely so it is available as a 15 minute video on Vimeo.) Jason Corburn is discussing re-connecting the fields of public health and urban planning. He writes,

While reconnecting planning and public health will require increased attention to the health effects of plans in geographic places, it will also demand that the field recognize its role in the politics of “place-making.” Planning must increasingly be understood as a profession that manages conflicts over political power and values that arise when, for instance, state or private- sector objectives clash with those of local communities. If planning is to be reconnected with public health, planning practice must be conceptualized as a set of outcomes (e.g., housing, transportation systems, urban designs) and processes that can (1) involve the use or abuse of power, (2) respond to or resist market forces, (3) work to empower certain groups and disempower others, and (4) promote multiparty consensual decisionmaking discourses or simply rationalize decisions already made.

In other words, planning practice involves choices regarding which information is deemed relevant, what decisionmaking processes will be used, and when, or if, various publics will be involved in making the plan. Reconnecting the fields will require increased attention to the politics of planning practice (i.e., in terms of shaping public agendas and attention), available evidence and norms of inquiry, inclusive or exclusive deliberations, and responses (or lack thereof) to bias, discrimination, inequality, and recalcitrance.1

I really like that. It doesn’t solve, but it does speak to, what I’m seeing is the role of planners in outcomes and processes — which is that we aren’t typically at the lowest level of outcomes, and we aren’t wielding the power to start things along, but we shepherd a process of working the issues on both sides. It also means we are ever-changing.

1 Corburn, J. (2004). Confronting the Challenges in Reconnecting Urban Planning and Public Health. Am J Public Health, 94(4), 541-546. doi:10.2105/AJPH.94.4.541

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Online Social Networking, Travel Behaviours and Choice of Urban Transportation Mode

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Ideas, Scholarship, Technology | tagged as , , ,

Friend Rob Cottingham drew an interesting webcomic recently.

Noise 2 Signal by Rob Cottingham.

Noise 2 Signal by Rob Cottingham.

His witty and observant comic is syndicated on ReadWriteWeb, a techhnology-focused blog. The comic touches on a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own life that I’ve had a chance to do a little bit of scholarly work on; namely, how well mobile technologies go with transit. I first approached the question: does this mean that those who have access to transit have more time to spend using mobiles for social networking, obtaining information or coordinating socially? Also, does living in areas with good transit mean more possibilities to be more flexible and fluid with allocating time for activities of daily life? I know for myself that driving causes me more stress and takes away at least a good 30 minutes that I spend alternating between reading, writing, and decompressing. And even though the stress associated with transit certainly isn’t zero, I know for my personality and circumstance that I get an awful lot of flexibility from being lucky enough to be served well by transit.

I wrote a paper on this topic earlier this year, drawing in a thread on physical activity as well. My realm of choice expands exponentially when I put my bike on the bus — something I’m also very lucky to be able to do because the buses here in Vancouver all have bike racks (although I also live on a route serving the university which means occasionally the bike racks are too full to take me! A happy problem but a problem nonetheless). That means I take the bus to school to avoid that hill, and ride home in the evenings when my time isn’t so crunched by meetings — and get a good hour of decent cardio in.

It’s expanding these choices — to walk and take the bus or train when it suits me, to bike when the weather’s right, and borrow a car from the local car-share if I’m carrying stuff — that strikes me as the “good stuff” of cities. But it’s also being able to coordinate in real-time with the people in my life, to know what’s up with them and manipulate my spatial circumstances based on what I know about how they’re doing, that’s also rocking my world. I’m also paying handsomely for it — and I’m not talking about the 3G data plan! Rather, it’s that access to good transit and decent mixed land use places where one can walk to meet their daily needs and get to work in a reasonable amount of time, often come with a hefty price tag. In my case, I trade-off the fact that I don’t own a car with higher rent.

Anyway, I find it interesting that Apple’s also clued into this and has focused their latest iPhone commercial on the use of public transit applications for navigating cities and commuting. In more academic terms, I’m interested to see how social media, location services and online social networking might accrue different benefits to people based on what they prefer, transportation mode-wise, as well as how all these taken together might actually affect travel behaviour.

My paper’s perhaps a tad more articulate; go take a look at A Behaviour Settings Approach to Impacts of ICTs, Travel Behaviour and Built Environment on Physical Activity.

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Doing vs Reflecting – thoughts on academia and the subtle art of change

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Ideas, Scholarship | tagged as , , , , , ,

A bit of a rant.

I’m in the process of putting together a proposal for an internship. It’s a super-exciting project, one that’s sure to stretch me at least a little bit. It’s been in a bit of a limbo as my digital film class, work, papers and so many other opportunities too good to pass up have swallowed up anything I had resembling a normal life.

On the one hand, I’m being advised to keep things manageable — scoping what I want to do quite specifically. This is an internship, not a thesis, and the intent of the exercise is to really get me confident in practicing the skills of a planner. I was advised to have it be perhaps more literature based, and to not even think about collecting data — too much hassle for something that’s supposed to be rather brief. And given my quantitative skills are quite untested, descriptive statistics only. I was hearing exactly what I wanted to hear, in fact, because I’d spent a whole month tearing myself to shreds about what I could possibly do with this opportunity. Even if this strays on the research side of things, it took me all that time for me to realize this myself: this is a planning internship. I’m not necessarily required to make a contribution to scholarship with the report I write for it. (Breathing…) So the real aim is to focus on the skills I want to practice, and what I want to say I did at the end of the four months. How awesome — I pretty much get to define exactly what I want out of it and all I have to do is write it up. That said, I’m really way too used to being told what to do for this to be entirely comfortable. But that’s OK too.

Yesterday I had a meeting with the people working in the project itself. I’m a big fan of action and participatory research, because it involves actually doing something rather than observing from afar. I like to get my feet wet and my hands dirty, what can I say, though I’m still a bit new to it. The most important thing I walked out of that meeting with was that there’s several different heights: the theoretical height that planners do most of their work from, looking at things 10, 15, 20, 30 years down the road. The impacts of a land user planner’s decisions may not manifest for ages! And yet, this project involves people who are planning for actions in the next 6 months. Their concerns are a little more, shall we say, quotidian, and they have to find ways to make things work with what they have right now — which is often an urban form that’s not conducive to active transportation (cycling or walking), despite the mountain of evidence that’s piling up about how much benefit doing these things yield.

So my issue right now is picking the right ‘height’ from which to do my internship. I don’t necessarily want to be right on the ground — that’s for the people I’m working with. But I don’t want my work to be at an abstract height so far above that my work is completely irrelevant to the project, either now or in its future. I’m fortunate, because the project does have data collection happening on its own, so I can have data to play with. My advisor was also OK with me doing interviews, so maybe that’s where I can do something a little more rich and interesting on this topic.

(Breathing…)

This is exactly the conversation I need to be having with myself and I’m pretty sure one any researcher doing work with communities must have, so if nothing else, I’m glad I actually wrote it down this time! Now to pump out that proposal for next week…

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