If No One’s Mad, You’re Not Pushing Hard Enough
Great civic ideas almost inevitably pissed someone off. So if no one’s mad, you’re more likely to be preserving a museum exhibit that create something for where people actually live, play and work.
There’s a peculiar myth, particularly popular in the planning departments of most cities, especially mid-sized ones, or those with mid-sized mindsets … that’s you Toronto, yes offence. They believe that civic progress should be a smooth and harmonious process, thinking that doing it well means offending absolutely no one. The logic seems to be for a plan to truly be considered ‘good’, everyone will agree with it, and nobody will have any objections.
All will be ‘aligned’. (God I hate that word.)
It is, of course, nonsense. Maybe it’s even worse than that, it’s bloody dangerous!
The sort of thinking that gives you cycle lanes no cyclist wants, rather than a network people actually need. Or architectural guidelines that no architect really wants to work with. Oh and those public consultations where the only people who show up are those with the time and inclination to be permanently outraged. You know the type, they’re everywhere, even if the cohort is relatively small.
The goal becomes to manage for these people and their grievances, rather than designing for what the majority might actually want, even if they don’t really know how to actually ask for it.
This is what makes virtually everything around urbanism so challenging, because cities do not progress by striving for consensus, but by embracing some contrast and conflict, ideally of the productive, slightly mischievous kind. It’s literally why this publication is called Challenger Cities. If it’s not challenging something or someone, it’s likely not particularly interesting. It will mean however that someone, somewhere, has been dislodged from their longstanding and somewhat undeserved position of power or convenience.
Let’s remind ourselves that car owners were furious when pedestrian zones were first proposed, still are in Toronto. But now you’ll find them strolling much more pleasant boulevards that used to be expressways. Landlords howl when tenants are given any shred of leverage, but the thing that makes their real estate valuable is a diverse and desirable customer base. Virtually every new form of public transport seems to arrive with its own chorus of doubters convinced the money would be better spent on filling potholes or giving it to autonomous vehicles and fleets of robotaxis.
But who gets angry matters.
If your proposed change enrages the already disenfranchised, it’s almost certainly not progress. If it irks the car dominant, consultancy hiring, property price obsessed class, then bingo!, you may have stumbled across something interesting.
So much so, I want to propose a new planning metric that I’m going to call the Pissed-Off Quotient (POQ™*). An unscientific, but surprisingly accurate measure of civic momentum. If your plan has a POQ of zero, you’re not building a future city; you’re preserving a heritage museum. If you’re scoring something like a 36 (out of 100), you might be in a good spot, for anything higher than that might be a bit much. Anything in single digits is possibly a bit unambitious. Obviously, if you’re up in the 80s and 90s then you’ve done something rather impressive by annoying basically everyone.
I’d give Anne Hilalgo a score in the high 30s for her transformation of Paris. John Tory gets maybe a 12 for his spell as Toronto mayor. Nobody was screaming all too loudly, but bugger all got done. Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, while vastly different, both probably kept things in the lanes of just annoying enough. Olivia Chow in Toronto just now likely gets an impressive 75 by doing as little to upset anyone, and upsetting the majority. The POQ is a tricky beast.
Nobody wants to live inside the photoshoot
This is a weird analogy, but think of a city like a good coffee table. They’re not meant to be polished to a shine and admired from a distance. They’re messy, adaptive, living things, with weird and wonderful books and publications being picked up and put down, likely with a few crumbs from a delicious snack and some mug stains because nobody uses a coaster all the time. It’s effectively a living object, that happens to look good in a magazine as well as a magazine on it.
We’re looking for something that says “interesting things happen here” … even if you might not be into all of those things, you will be into or curious about some of them at least. Inclusion, not sterilisation, is the game.
What’s most stifling is not the occasional outrage (there will always be shit ideas and silly proposals), but the desperate bureaucratic impulse to avoid any sort of dissent altogether, as if the worst possible outcome of a civic intervention is a negative media headline. In truth, the worst outcome is no reaction at all, a shrug, a yawn and a collective expression of “meh”.
The thing may end up being delivered, but will anyone actually care? Will it change behaviour? Will it attract visitors? Will it make a difference?
If you get a Pissed-Off Quotient of something in the range of 18-49, the proposal should probably be prioritised, because it means the old guard has noticed, squirmed … and could, potentially, have their mind changed. If no one’s mad, power is being polished rather than challenged.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather a city that occasionally gets it wrong in the name of trying something, being a bit experimental, than one that gets just about the passing grade without really learning anything. Even the cockups are visit worthy in the end.