Westward Ho!

APA '07

The nor'easter is in full swing -- with wind, rain, and ice bearing down on Philadelphia, and conference attendees who've been promised a most "walkable" city are lining up in droves to catch a taxi five blocks back to their hotel. I just left early because my toasty room at the Sheraton suddenly seemed very inviting; I nearly fell asleep in the comforting darkness of a convention center screening room where an Ed Bacon film festival was going on (mostly his 1983 ULI documentaries), having dosed myself up on Robitussin a few hours prior. I bought a t-shirt before I took off.

Conference is going OK; the highlight so far was RFK Jr.'s keynote address, crucifying the Bush administration and all the corporate polluters that Dubya hired to run the various federal environmental offices (run them into the ground, that is). Kennedy is very clear on who his enemies are and he's not afraid to name names. Frankly, I worry for his safety.

Over the past few days I've been gravitating towards the transportation/infrastructure sessions, including panels on airports, bus shelters, short-haul rail travel across megaregions, and sidewalk building and maintenance. There's been a nice assortment of of planning books on sale -- some of which I'll make a mental note to look for used on Amazon, although I did order a copy of a former professor's book through the on-site APA display.

We've been eating well too: last night was a reception where the Yuengling and Tastykakes flowed freely, and on Friday night we had great Senegalese food near the Penn campus. Thumbs way up on the Reading Terminal Market -- which, incidentally, is across from the erstwhile Reading Railroad station, now the convention center.

Manhole Covers

Tonight in my Infrastructure class we got off on a tangent about manhole covers. I sheepishly mentioned that a few years ago someone gave me a book about manhole covers for my birthday -- and everyone in the class who knew me started cracking up. I guess I've been elected class weirdo.

Housing Inspection

Since August, my neighbors and I have complained about the conditions in our university-owned apartment building -- gates that don't lock properly, rusting metal, rotting wood on door frames, broken exterior bricks, smelly/dirty carpeting (I got mine replaced), holes in the walls (I bought spackle the day I moved in), broken bike racks, a hedge out front that homeless people were using as a naptime area (we got this removed), not to mention problems with crickets, roaches, waterbugs, mice, and at least one snake (the pest-control issue is being dealt with case-by-case, but something much more comprehensive needs to happen). But we've been collectivizing and reaching out to various people, and later this morning, at last, the big guns are coming in: the Los Angeles Housing Department is inspecting for code violations. What that means is...

Properties that do not meet City and State codes regarding issues of maintenance, use, or habitability are cited with a "Notice to Comply". Property owners are generally given 30 days to have the required repairs completed. A re-inspection is performed to verify that the corrective work was done.  

If repairs are not completed within the time period specified on the Notice to Comply, the owner will be summoned to an administrative hearing at the Housing Department to determine the reason for non-compliance and when the required repairs will be completed. If further enforcement steps become necessary, the file may be forwarded to the Office of the City Attorney as a criminal complaint.

The news came in the form of a flyer on my door Tuesday morning, one day after an internal inspection by the university's housing office -- I don't know the overall results of that survey, but the checklist they left behind on my kitchen counter suggests that I've been doing my part to keep things up to whatever their departmental code is. (Basically, my smoke detector works and there aren't any immediate fire hazards or accumulated garbage -- but then, I'm paranoid enough that I take out my trash nearly every day now.)

My fear is that our building will just squeak through the LAHD inspection and our housing people will continue to do the absolute minimum and spend the least money they can until they can get us out of here in May (when our contracts end) and start work on the extensive teardown/renovation/miracle transformation they have planned.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Planetizen has just published its 2007 Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs, ranking the top 25 schools in the U.S. and Canada. (The top 25, both overall and by reputation alone, were all in the U.S.). My school did well enough -- number 9 overall on a list populated by Berkeley, MIT, and some Ivies -- but the results are definitely skewed towards the coasts, with a few outliers in the Great Lakes, Ohio, and the western coast of Florida. It's a bit sad that our major universities aren't better-distributed across the country. I think our fixation on Ivies (and maybe the top California schools?) has created a brain drain on parts of the U.S. that desperately need that intelligence. Moreover, cities in the inner South and New West (Phoenix, et al) are only going to move further towards complete privatization and increasingly piss-poor social services unless someone steps in and gets people thinking about public planning, civic engagement, and issues that are more important than just protecting property values and shutting down adult bookstores. I realize that the deck is stacked against universities that don't already have built-in "reputations" -- and many of those less-famous universities are in those critical geographical areas, e.g. Nevada. But with Nevada's population growing tremendously, what can it do to retain bright students and put a school like UNLV on the map for more than just sports? Because the image above troubles me.

Pershing Square (Flickr set)

A classmate and I are working on a project about Pershing Square, and since I had a free afternoon today, I went and snapped some photos, and uploaded them into a Flickr set. I'm not a good enough photographer to make the ugly parts look sufficiently ugly (and not merely drab), but I can't let my ego go for long enough to play a straight-up documentarian. I like finding the beauty in mundanity, and I think I made Pershing Square seem a lot more attractive than it actually is -- on the other hand, maybe the square is less of a design failure than I initially thought.

Back to School

Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon and I have something in common -- we've both returned to school after a long stretch doing time in the real world. My stretch is nowhere near as long as Thornton's -- I got my B.A. in 1998 and have taken various test-prep and professional skills-building classes in the interim -- but at 29-going-on-30 I still feel like the old lady of my first-year cohort. And although I'm sure the professors will reserve the same level of scorn for me they do for all the other clueless first-years (maybe more, considering how yakking about urban planning is all I'm capable of lately), I really admire their expertise and can't wait to exploit it for personal gain.

Today I had my first two classes: Intro to Planning Theory, and the Legal Environment of Planning. Both are going to be tremendous fun, in different ways. One is as academic and abstract as social/political philosophy can be, but with the necessary wiggle room for lightheartedness that appeals to audiences who aren't yet immersed in the rhetoric. The latter is very much a law-school class -- terminology, cases, and intricacies of policy are rattled off rapid-fire, diagrams and pie charts are drawn and quickly erased for lack of blackboard space. Key subjects are introduced, disappear down a rabbit hole of facts and figures and more facts, and reappear in passing 15 minutes later. And I was able to keep up with about 95-97 percent of that first session, even while my cell phone was ringing with a couple of urgent calls (I didn't answer, but I knew they were important). Lord knows those numbers will drop, but it appears that my few years as a hobbyist dilettante have served me well, and I've (gasp) never even played Sim City.

Tomorrow morning I've got Prof. Banerjee's class on public space -- it's a new course that was listed at the last minute, and the second I got the e-mail about it I dropped one of my requirements so I could fit this into my schedule. The assigned reading looks good: this and this, among other things (inc. this).