Strong Towns missed the point of the City Builder Institute

A response to Chuck Marohn's comments on the Upzoned Podcast

A few months ago, Strong Towns’ Upzoned podcast discussed¹ my recent piece Towards a New Way of Educating City Builders. ²

Totally unrelated caption showing maybe the finance guy and the foreman on a job site?

In the conversation, Chuck and Abby said many kind things about me–so much that I might blush. But in the final conclusion, Chuck in particular issued what I interpreted as a blanket dismissal of the core argument–that we don’t need new education institutions teaching in a different way.

Instead of needing new ways of educating city builders, he advocates we need to focus on changing the structures of local government to empower generalist problem solvers, small bets, and bottom up investment and decision making. I agree wholeheartedly!

Chuck mentioned the need for a “social worker” type person to coordinate the various technical professionals. This is a metaphor that I myself have often used. In my first planning job, I used to joke that a social worker would be more useful because the problems in getting to better policies were mostly interpersonal and not about better technical analysis. I don’t know whether Chuck got this idea from me or not, but I’ve certainly shared it with him and again, we wholeheartedly agree!

Cities need effective generalists that can navigate many competing priorities and personalities. I don’t think literal social workers would be best, but certainly the education and training of these generalists needs to emphasize interpersonal skills, social psych, communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, etc.

We agree that we need a diversity of personalities—that’s really the point of the “saving the world is a team sport” metaphor. I agree that our existing government institutions do a disservice by sorting out the big-picture thinkers and risk-takers in favor of the narrow and compliance-oriented. Most definitely! The best city managers I know are generalists who came up through the planning side. But much more common are the city managers who come up through the law or finance departments—the compliance arms of government.

Our first disagreement I think is whether we are or are not already training the people we need. Chuck seems to think that we have the people we need, we just need to empower them with different structures. I don’t think that we have the people that we need, either as specialist-leaders or as generalist problem solvers.

Chuck certainly meets a lot of great people with traditional educational backgrounds trying to make change in their communities. I don’t dismiss that experience at all. Being in the trenches of a particular place, working as a developer against narrow minded codes and disciplinary silos informs my experience. It’s much less clear to me that we have enough of the people that we need. From my experience teaching in several universities and working with recent graduates, I also don’t think that our schools do a great job—in terms of pedagogy, curriculum, or integration across disciplines.³

To take one example: here is the recommended four year curriculum for a civil engineering major at the University of Rhode Island. The first years are focused on foundational physical sciences. Students take more semesters of calculus than they do general education. There are no required (or recommended) courses on urban design, development, architecture, psychology, economics, politics, or cities more generally – all the stuff we need engineers to “get” in order to provide their unique capabilities to a team of city builders.

You might get lucky or be well advised to take some courses in this direction. But based on the curriculum, the Civil Engineering department doesn’t think it’s job is to help you think about why you’re engineering what you’re engineering. To paraphrase my conversation with Olin College’s founding president: when engineering programs narrowly focus on classroom math and science in the first years they weed out a bunch of capable engineers–not because they can’t do that work, but because they feel it’s boring and pointless.

The reality is that who becomes an engineer and how we train them is important. City Engineers are expected to be PE’s and have a tremendous amount of power and deference given to them The same is true of engineers at public utility companies, state DOT’s, and more. DPW directors are more often than not PE’s as well. If you agree that we need generalist problem solvers, we should make it easier for generalists–as well as the guys who’d just like to narrowly calculate math problems (we need both!)–to become engineers.

I think our second disagreement is around the logic of change. I agree that reforming the structure of city governance is important, perhaps more important than changing our schools. Chuck seems to think that there is a trade off between reforming education and reforming systems of governance. I don’t feel like any such trade off exists and that they are rather complementary. Reforming structures of city governance is quite a different enterprise from founding one or several new educational institutions.⁴ The former requires broad-based political and cultural transformation and can be instituted from the ground up. Building new educational institutions is harder and easier in different ways. There’s no check that a billionaire can write that will reform even one city government structure let alone thousands across the country. But that one person could bankroll a school.

Chuck says we can go out and change our structures today, tomorrow, ourselves in our towns. I’m less confident that we know the details of what reforming the structure of city government would look like. At least I don’t think I know. We have a lot of ideas and some promising case studies. I think we have a lot more work to do on that front as well. It’s going to take practice, research, and training to achieve. We will also need people who are suited to staff these new roles and who understand their professional practice in the context of this new system.

Ultimately we’ll have to create a new paradigm that we can shift into. I think Chuck and I agree that this is the big goal and opportunity of the Strong Towns movement.

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A final note on disagreement. At first I was pretty annoyed by what I felt was a dismissive response from Chuck on his podcast without even an opportunity to discuss or respond. I felt like I’d be trashed, in public, and by a friend. That’s a crappy feeling. So, I’ve taken a long time to respond.

I’ve also seen recently that Chuck’s been dragged online, especially by folks from CA YIMBY. I’m sure that’s been a crappy feeling. And to the extent it is causing people to tune out who they are curious about or willing to listen to, it seems harmful for the overarching “pro-change” movement to make cities and towns better.

I think disagreement is important. I don’t think we should always just agree on orthodoxy for the sake of the movement. If we stay curious, we can learn much more from lively debates and the friction of disagreement. This is important because I don’t think we have all the answers, or even all the questions. We should also seek to offer more grace to each other so that we can tolerate all this friction. So, as annoyed as I was, I think it’s better that Chuck disagrees with me and says so. In classic JS Mill fashion, It helps me find the points on which I may be wrong and improve upon them. It helps me clarify and sharpen the way that I communicate the points in which I am right. And it helps me know the difference.

If this post helped you know the difference, please like, share or leave a comment below.

1. They didn’t reach out to me in advance or invite me to participate–which is totally fine, people are more than welcome to discuss my work–but perhaps useful context.

2. Since I wrote this piece, I appeared on the Strong Towns Podcast and briefly discussed the importance of substantive disagreements.

3. There was an extended attempt to analyze my own educational background and how it might be informing my perspective. It quite missed the mark. It was said that for me school was probably a major formative event in my career—and it’s actually the reverse. Even at the time, I felt that the programs were not very good in coherence, rigor, or praxis. Looking back with all that I’ve learned from practice, mentorship, and reading, I feel like things could be made so much better!

4. I think there was a misunderstanding that I’m not proposing that we reform all our schools directly–that would be a truly exhausting effort–but rather building a small number of competitors that will drag the ecosystem in a new direction.