#planning practice

[mama-honest]

I really want to plan a mock wedding. Preferably something simple. Think I might do so. Anybody wanna share wedding dress/photos and I'll try to plan a wedding based on that and a location given. Reblog or ask. :)

[counti8]

Planning efforts to green our cities can only go so far since ecological footprint is largely determined by individual consumption rather than by urban form and pattern, the built environment, or institutional function. Consequently, if practicing planners want to be at the forefront of building more environmentally responsible cities, they must be directly involved in community outreach efforts that focus on educating the general public with respect to putting shared environmental values into action and to the significance of those actions regarding the future of cities and their inhabitants. As Arie de Geus, the well-known organizational learning specialist (1988, 70) who also served as Dutch Royal Shell's corporate Coordinator of Group Planning, perceptively noted, "... planning means changing minds not making plans." Therefore, both practicing and academic planners must be creative about how to begin changing minds, including our own, as we plan more environmentally responsible cities.

The Myth of Sustainable Cities from "The Practicing Planner", a publication of the American Planning Association. (via [Daniella](http://twitter.com/dfergusson) ), who referred to it in her tweet as "deep green", markedly contrasting the "bright green" approach favored by Alex Steffen among others. An interesting read — and there's a lot more before that quote (the last paragraph, admittedly; it's a bad habit of mine to quote the conclusions). My exposure to Bill Rees' work (quoted extensively in this article) is passable but not extensive, although I've had the chance to be in a class of his and to see him speak a couple of times. I've always been fascinated by the possibility of putting forward a deep green approach in ways that do not perpetuate pessimism, which is what I get when I read the linked piece. That kind of hopelessness leads to malaise and detachment. As a child who was taught to recycle at 6 and learned about climate change at 11, I don't think telling the truth has to be quite as bleak as it seems on paper. But it does require a hugely different cultural narrative about what it means to live as human beings in this point in time. Abandoning the concept of sustainable cities feels like abandoning the idea of the city altogether as a worthwhile human endeavour, reducing it to an almost guilty pleasure or antiquated indulgence — a thing we keep on doing because we are short-sighted, callous, selfish and uncaring, not something that we do as an outcropping of our social nature or our desire for diversity in our social experience. Getting rid of the concept of the sustainable city even as an unreachable ideal implies that we are absolutely certain that our collective continued existence cannot lie with them in _any_ form. I'm convinced the picture is _really, really_ bad. But stating from the get-go that cities will never be sustainable, no matter how much we may try to evolve our practices — and no, I'm not a huge believer of technical fixes either — feels deeply bleak. (But maybe I'm just not ready.)