City Hall and the City

city hall by ProSymbols from the Noun Project

“It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”

This is from Patricia Lockwood’s brilliant memoir “Priestdaddy.” Circumstance has required she and her husband retreat to her parents’ house for a few months. Her eccentric father is, a rarity, an ordained Catholic priest, married with a family.

With apologies to Ms Lockwood, I’ll appropriate this passage as a useful metaphor for things that ail the relationship between citizens and their City Hall.

If City Hall distances itself from the messy, dynamic city, if it is not in every sense a friend of the city, the city becomes to it theoretical, a remote thing, seen only on computer screens, in technical reports and planners’ arcane zoning codes.

We everyday citizens observe every day that the city is very much not theoretical. We observe that City Hall seems often uncomfortable with the city, even afraid of it. City Hall often struggles frustratedly to get the dynamic ever-changing city to fit inside its decades old fixed “plans.”

"Political leaders “need to understand they are operating in a complex adaptive system.. they should write the need for revision into every piece of legislation.” Roger L. Martin

"Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences...  The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. Ch21 The Kind of Problem a City is.

On this @streetsplanning podcast, @Just_J_Ruffin connects with JPB @c1typlann3r to discuss @EmbeddedPlann’ing praxis, his career arc, recent @Medium article & his newly launched solo venture @C1TYPLANN3RCo! Episode inspired by NWA’s “Express Yourself” 🎧https://t.co/P4xbXqtiqw

— Embedded Planning (@EmbeddedPlann) February 26, 2021

City Hall and the City @Medium

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