Two Films & an Exhibit
Cultural Events for the Planning-Curious
Apologies up front that two of these events are location-specific, but these are too planning-curious museum person-y not to share.
A Film About an Epic Planning Fail
Inundation District is a feature-length documentary by David Abel and Ted Blanco that explores relatively recent Boston urban planning gone horribly wrong thanks to the willful ignoring of climate change (and buckets of money). As the website explains, “one of the world’s wealthiest, most-educated cities made a fateful decision to spend billions of dollars erecting a new district along its coast — on landfill, at sea level. Unlike other places imperiled by climate change, this neighborhood of glass towers housing some of the world’s largest companies was built well after scientists began warning of the threats.” Some of you may recall this 2018 video of a dumpster a block away from the Boston Children’s Museum washing down Seaport District street. That dumpster puts in a cameo in the film.
I had the chance to see the film at a Massachusetts planners’ event, which featured a discussion with Abel. My first takeaway is that my belief that “every city or town has a planning office” isn’t entirely accurate – at least in this case. The City instead has had – until very, very recently – the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which as the name suggests, was focused on development without apparently much of a mandate to think about “maximizing the health, safety, and economic well-being” of its residents.1 Under Mayor Wu, the agency is now called the Boston Planning & Development Agency, but as Abel noted during the after-film discussion, only time will tell if the renaming is just “lipstick on a pig”.
I highly recommend attending one of the upcoming screenings if you can. If you’re doing any work in climate communication/climate literacy, this will increase your resolve - if it doesn’t crush your soul. Check out the trailer to see which way it’ll affect you. If nothing else, it absolutely cements my conviction that we all need to help increase public awareness of and engagement in planning (even more so if the “planning” in question is so blatantly rigged).
The future cannot be left in the hands of the few, and the film does a masterful job of raising the “tragedy of the commons” question: who will be stuck paying for the inevitable damage to all of this privately held real estate. My favorite voices in the film were two (self-identified) homeless men who live in the district and deal directly with rapidly changing sea-level rise. They are a reminder that the people most directly impacted by climate change are those with the fewest resources and least access to power.
All that said, I don’t think the film is a good entrée into climate education for a general audience, unless it is accompanied by information about civically actionable climate solutions. Without that, it risks reinforcing the demotivating Hope Gap that I mentioned in my post about the Landscape for Change project on Mount Desert Island.2
Housing Exhibit & City Model-Building Interactive
In Building (Tabletop) Model Cities, I wrote about accomplishing a variety of engagement goals with hands-on model building, including the work of James Rojas and his urban planning company with John Kamp, PlaceIt! Those of you near Santa Monica, CA can go see one of these model-building activities at Santa Monica History Museum, between now and December 31, 2024.
The exhibit UnHoused: A History of Housing in Santa Monica explores the history of housing policy and development in the city, which includes the classic American stew of discrimination and redlining, access and restriction. The museum is also using the exhibit to foster thought and community dialogue about current and future housing issues in Santa Monica (which again mirror discussions across the U.S.: affordability, ADUs and residential zoning changes, etc. ) For the exhibit, Rojas explains: “I built an interactive model for patrons to physically explore and imagine the various housing typologies. The base map consists of 24 full city blocks and 13 half blocks. Each block is divided into 14 lots (1” x 2”). I built the various housing types to fit within these lots. [So that visitors can] reimagine what 438 city lots with dingbats, single family homes, apartments, courts and ADU's can look and feel like.”
I love the rest of the explanation that he sent to me, so I’m sharing it whole:
“Creating the Santa Monica Interactive Housing Model allowed me to reflect on my first planning job with the city 30 years. For lunch I would walk over the freeway and through the mall to explore the small downtown. The area was dominated by older single-story retail buildings, some older taller buildings, and a few remaining homes. Downtown Santa Monica was walkable and had a quiet 1950’s charm to it. Sears and JCPenney had seen better days but the overall vibe was relaxing.
Today the area is bustling with new developments that are wider, taller, louder, and have faceless facades, which for me disrupts the pedestrian vibe by erasing the fine-grained details of the small-scale older buildings. The shade and wind tunnels created by these buildings make walking unpleasant with the increase of traffic whizzing by. Today downtown feels more like a pass-through or an extension of the 10 freeway.
My model attempts to recapture the fine-grain human scale of area through detailed buildings, landscapes, and by using various housing typologies that can improve the quality of public space and pedestrian experience. Through the model we can experiment with emotions that are expressed through forms, colors and textures. How the place should feel is just as important as its function. We need to think of new ways of building housing and our cities.”
This issue of emotions is huge, I think when it comes to community engagement in planning. My city’s new master plan calls for changing zoning in to allow for incremental increases in density to increase the stock of housing. One plan is to allow owners of single family houses to build one Accessory Dwelling Unit (a.k.a. “ADU”, “in-law apartment” or “granny flat”). The ADU proposal that I saw had a lot of reasonable restrictions (the unit has to be smaller than the house, owner needs to live in one of the units, etc.)
But you wouldn’t know it from a recent neighborhood newsletter that cites worries like “out of town investors … buying single family homes and turning them into de-facto rooming houses” and concern that City’s Plan “repeatedly paints single family zoning as a problem.” Well, yes, indeed, many communities are examining the relationship between single family zoning and housing shortages. And they are looking at “Gentle Density” – infilling existing single family neighborhoods to add to housing stock without drastically changing the neighborhoods’ look and feel.
The bottom line, for me, comes back to the need for many more community conversations, getting people more engaged in nuances of community planning - including exploring the emotions involved - and creating more trusted messengers who can in turn engage others in those nuances.
Ooops – that was a bit of a tangent (to the surprise of no one who knows me). So now on to the film that anyone can see - and the reason for the pic of ice cream.
The Place Man: Origins of the Project for Public Spaces
In my last post, I mentioned that placemaking, the practice of using art and design to rewrite the social script in public spaces, making them welcoming and engaging for as many different people as possible. One of the leading placemaking champions is the Project for Public Spaces, that asks us to “imagine a world where everyone has the opportunity to shape public spaces.” PPS is one of the inspirations for the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces, that created the “Middle Ground: Reconsidering ourselves and others” exhibition in front of San Francisco’s main public library. (If you missed my post about the project – go back and read it. It was one of the projects that first confirmed my suspicion that museums need to be working with planners. And it’s just plain inspiring.)
Definitely take the time to noodle around on the Project for Public Spaces website to see all that they do and offer (technical assistance and training, toolkits, blog, annual placemaking and public market conferences, even grants!) Lots of help if your museum is planning any public-facing spaces, and even more if you’re doing so with your municipality. There’s now a 20-minute documentary The Place Man that talks about the roots and underlying principles behind the placemaking movement. I confess that the first several minutes dragged a bit for me, but I really enjoyed the doc overall. There’s a mini-review about urban planning thinker Jane Jacobs – and you learn why PPS founder Fred Kent thinks ice cream is very important to planning.
~ Betsy Loring3
The Planning-Curious Museum Person
Sharing stories and ideas for other Planning-Curious Museum People and for Museum-Curious Planning People.
"The goal of planning is to maximize the health, safety, and economic well-being of residents in ways that reflect the unique needs, desires, and culture of those who live and work within the community.” Cynthia Bowen, past president of the American Planning Association, in the essay What is Planning?
There are plenty of hope-based climate resources out there. One I just learned about through my daughter is this discussion between professional cynic Adam Conover and Dr. Hannah Ritchie about the data stories behind her book "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet."
I am the founder of expLoring exhibits & engagement. I’ve got over 20 years’ experience in project management and exhibit development in multidisciplinary, indoor and outdoor museum settings. My services include exhibit master planning, content and interactive development, and writing, with a focus on hands-on STEM. I also offer staff training in exhibition planning, formative evaluation, and prototyping. My special interests include multi-institutional collaborations, peer-to-peer professional development, and of course – collaboration with municipal planning practitioners.