How to Make Friends in a Strange Land

One of the most bizarre social occurrences that I have observed as I have become an adult is that unless one has a specific social group to which one belongs it's really hard to make friends.

Obviously, there are adults of similar levels of intelligence that one interacts with at one's workplace, if applicable.

But what about those who are unemployed? And especially those who are unemployed and not not religious? Nor civically inclined?

I have a friend who had a job and was laid off. She isn't religious and has limited interest in civic engagement. She lived in LA for a whole year before I came to school and she volunteered with two groups. But both of these groups are rather insular in nature and she didn't feel like she could really fit in.

Another friend is highly accomplished and independently wealthy, but has to take care of her mother who has health issues. She lives up in wine country, ie northern California, and has to drive into the city to get social interaction.

On the other hand, I feel very fortunate to have made great friends while attending grad school. I've also made some good friends at my internship.

Making friends is something that we do naturally as children. But as we become adults the social opportunities become more limited. And finding ways to make new ones sometimes feels like building a working spaceship only from parts purchasable at Home Depot.

Helping my point is a clip from the Big Bang Theory.

The brilliant, but socially inept, Dr. Sheldon Cooper, on CBS's the Big Bang Theory wants to endear himself to a colleague who has access to a super cool microscope or particle collider or something physicists lust after. But his colleague rebuffs his advances. Undeterred, Sheldon is determined to turn a colleague into a friend. Seeking advice, he sought out advice at the local children's bookstore. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtyEbAgNJsQ

I wrote a paper for my History of Urban Planning about the loss of thirdspace. My thesis stated that as people were able to afford single family homes their social lives became more and more focused within the home instead of exterior. One need only look at the ever-expanding home entertainment section of Best Buy to see this is true.

This argument fits well within the paradigm of suburbia. But what about in a big city? While the burden ultimately lies within each one of us to find and make friends it helps if there are public spaces for us to bump into people and to make connections.

365 Cities?

I was thinking as I have been getting ready to go to Chicago in the dead of winter for a poorly-thought out birthday present to self how can we make 365 Cities?

What I mean is that we in the planning world talk about "24 Hour Streets." 24 Hour Streets are streets where there are few lags in activity throughout a 24 hour period. Think New York City streets- many of them have delivery trucks coming at the crack of dawn or in the middle of the night to make their drop-offs, then the commuters hustle along the same streets to get to work. After the morning rush hour tourists or senior citizens or work-at-home people may take a walk on the same strips of cement that a mere hour before expensive wingtips and stilettos traipsed upon. Then comes the lunch crowd and the afternoon tourists, students, and free lancers. 4 o'clock - 7 o'clock the corporate workers pour out of their office buildings and make the trek home. They mingle with the dinner crowd and after that comes the wave of pub crawls and nightlife seekers. Although last call may come at 2 or 3 AM the delivery trucks are starting up. And the cycle continues.

This is of course an idealistic concept and not every street in NYC is busy at every hour of the day. But the point is that there is usually always something going on.

Therefore, I wondered, if there are 24 Hour Streets, could we make 365 Cities?

In THE biggest cities in the world like New York and Tokyo yes we can have 365 cities. These two places, and maybe London? (I wouldn't know, haven't been) or Rome-? are such hubs of activity that like the Post Office neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor hail will deter the public from using the city be it for work or pleasure. If it's raining in Tokyo and it's your first time there are you seriously going to just stay in your hotel room and watch it come down? Unlikely!

But what about places where there may not be as many attractions to pull you out of your hotel room or there are attractions, but the weather can be mercurial? For example, Chicago.

It's easy to create walkable communities in places where it is sunny and warm at least 8 months out of the year (though it can also be potentially humid or muggy during those sunny warm times). But what if 8 of those months, or it feels like 8, are either snowing, raining, or hailing?

Although I have great respect for the New Urbanists, but they tend to gloss over the effect regional weather can have on people's desire to go for a walkabout. The New Urbanists are also are savvy enough to build their most well known developments below the Mason-Dixon line. Two of the most well-known members, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk made their names with Seaside, FL and Celebration, FL, www.dpz.com

In a related argument there are several critics who scoff at the "skywalks" of Minneapolis and other cities, saying that it takes away from the character of the street. But what if the "character" is only out for 6 months of the year? Yes, I know, 6 is more than zero. But 4 of those months you are all but guaranteed snow, wind, and/or freezing temperatures. People think I'm joking. Ha! Come to Minnesota in April or October and we'll see who the joke's on now! PS- bring a scarf. As Dean Martin said, "baby, it's cold outside!"

And I would argue that skywalks will not provide the final nail in the proverbial coffin. I first encountered the skywalks of Minneapolis in the third grade, from the street level thank you very much. Contrary to whatever futurist nightmares the critics think skywalks will produce I can assure you that Minneapolis does not look like some Bladerunner-like city out of the Matrix with tubes coming out of buildings. There are a few. They are incredibly useful in the winter. But the downtown skyline doesn't look like a cyber-punk octopus is trying to strangle all of the buildings.

However, all is not lost. Ray Oldenburg, in his work, the Great Good Place, talks about "third spaces," which I also cite a lot, especially in this blog. And I would like to propose that perhaps, although we planners advocate for increased walkability and people mingling on the streets, perhaps "third spaces" are more realistic for places with less than ideal weather and an auto-centric world.

Oldenburg's examples of third spaces include: cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts (to crib from his subtitle). For my pop culture reference of the day, the movie Barbershop (starring Ice Cube and Eve) predominately takes place in a "third space," a barbershop, from which the movie takes its title. The movie is also set some time in winter on the South Side of Chicago and as it is too cold to mingle on the streets for long many of the characters in the film come into the barbershop for their social contact. See if that happens at your local Supercuts be it in Chicago or San Diego.

I'm all for walkability, but I think that critics need to be realistic about what people are willing to do under normal circumstances. And if there are not ideal meteorological conditions, people will be apt to stay inside. This doesn't mean that there can't be indoor third spaces. Will this lead to 365 Cities? Probably not. What makes Tokyo and New York so special is that they're always on, they have an electric pulse that thrums with the life of their city. Should Cleveland or Rochester be strive to be like that? No, but finding ways to create third spaces within their cities would serve them well, especially when "baby it's cold outside!"

Old John

I came across this great article from the UCLA journal of Critical Planning, Spring 1999 (pages 119-122) entitled, Six Roads to Perdition by John Friedmann, Professor Emeritus, at UCLA (copy permission pending. Just so we're clear, until my copy request comes through, I had nothing to do with this, so please don't sue me!)

It's refreshing, even iconoclastic, to hear a rather tongue-in-cheek evaluation of the constantly self-contradictory world of planning. Does one focus on theory or real-world work experience? GIS or Lewis Mumford?! Especially from someone who is in a position to give out advice-

Professor Emeritus John Friedmann's response to the query-
From both your knowledge of UCLA and your new perspective 'down under," how do you see planning?

1. The seduction of "being parochial"
The Great Seducer murmurs into your ear: Think local, act local. All the universe is in a grain of sand. Los Angeles (or name any other city) is a huge laboratory for aspiring planners. Work in it. Discover it. Why bother with anywhere else? There is so little time.
And Old John replies: Time is scarce, but the world is wide. Los Angeles is only one dot on the map and doesn't foreshadow what's in store for any other city. Look beyond the horizon if you want to know your own backyard. Without knowing about other places, and how they are different from where you live, study, and work, you lack perspective and your capacity for innovative thinking is restricted to what's before you. Learn about planning cities and regions in Asia, for example, where most of the world's urbanization will take place in the coming century. Then return to look at Los Angeles with new yes, with a vision trained to see differences and similarities. Planning is increasingly a cosmopolitan profession.

2. The seduction of "community" The Great Seducer murmurs into your ear: Work in the community, for the community, become a part (119) of it all. This is how you can be a radical planner. Think people; think small; build communities. Don't be a patsy to Big Capital. And Old John replies: You don't build communities with only people. And the city is more than a mosaic of neighborhoods, each separated from its surroundings by a moat. If you want to fight poverty, you've got to think beyond the locality to the region which it supports. Impoverished neighborhoods- communities- can do a few things for themselves, but they can't create paying jobs, they can't substitute for services which only the city can provide. Discover how the regional and the local connect; learn how region connects to region in a global system; find out the dynamics of regional change. Planners must learn to think and work at different scales. No single scale is sufficient unto itself.

3. The seduction of "learning by doing" The Great Seducer murmurs into your ear: get out there and practice; get real. That's the only way you ever learn anything worthwhile. Forget about books. Practice is all you need. Do projects; and when you've done one, do another and another. Until you master the art of city planning. And Old John replies: practice-based planning education can take you only part of the way to where you want to go. You need theoretical understandings, too. You need to get to know the tacit theories that inform your and other planners' practice. You need to find out how people elsewhere have confronted problems different from those you want to solve. Some ways of posing problems are better than others. There are principles to be learned. The issue is how to find the right balance between theoretical learning and practice.

4. The seduction of "unreflected practice" The Great Seducer murmurs into your ear: Don't bother with planning theory; that's nothing but blabber, a bunch of overage white academics writing to entertain each other. No practitioner can afford to waste (120) time reading them. Just go out and practice; you'll be all right. And Old John replies: How do you know what is good practice? Have you thought about the different practices of planning? Have you already figured out how planning relates to other knowledges and practices? Do you understand how knowledge is created and legitimized? And think about this. What ethical norms should guide you as a planner? Why are theorists talking about the "communicative turn" in planning? and when they do, what are they leaving out? What does it mean to be reflective about one's professional practice? And how shall we reflect on it? Planning theory (and the history of planning properly understood) provides a forum for rethinking a practice that should never be applied as if all the routines of planning were already settled. Can you learn to be a good planner by reading only a textbook of planning?

5. The seduction of "methods" The Great Seducer murmurs into your ear: You are insecure. You ask: Do I have a future in planning? And so, because you feel insecure, you have a hunger for skills that will get you your first job. You want to learn the skills that are prized in the marketplace. You're right. Load up on them: do stats and modeling and GIS and social surveys. Go and study finance and learn how to put a budget together and how to finance big real estate operations. Don't waste your time in seminars discussing theories that have only fuzzy answers. if they have any at all. it's hard methods that will get you ahead in the world. And Old John replies: Don't be fooled by this craze for "how do I do this or that." What's the good of knowing "how" if you don't know the "what" or "why" of practice? Indeed, what is the problem to be solved? What are the different readings on it? Who wants it solved? And why? Is it the planner's job to second-guess the market, to build in advance of the market, or what? Methods are the least problematical aspect of planning. You can run statistical regressions until you drop and still not know what the (121) problem is, what should be done (if anything), and why taking on this problem is important. There are generic skills, like writing, public speaking, doing graphics, working with people in small groups, and mediating conflicts, which are useful in all situations planners are likely to face. But beyond that...go slow on methods until you know what problems you want to solve. Your time might be better spent on all those fuzzy theories that give you a headache, worrying about the what and the why.

6. The seduction of "theory" The Great Seducer murmurs into your ear: Theory is what the smartest people do. It's a game you, too, will enjoy. We can spend hours, weeks, months, a lifetime talking about words: lifeworld, simulacra, thirdspace, deconstruction, discourse analysis, untraded interdependencies, flexible accumulation, communicative action, heterotopia, epistemology, differance, embodiment, and so on and so forth in an endless stream of infinitely fascinating writings. Without them you are truly lost, can't find your way. Planning you can always learn on the job. While you are studying. It's theory you should go for. And Old John replies: Theory is good, but practice is also good. You must have both if you want to be a planner. Theory informs practice and vice versa. Without the synapse to practice, theory is an addiction. The test of a good theory is: will it help me in my practice? If it doesn't, leave theory to the social, human, and cultural sciences. Planners need good theories to think about cities and regions as well as about their own practice. The trick is to connect them to the objects of planning.

John Friedmann lives in Melbourne, Australia. His current research interests include the development of cities and regions in the Pacific Rim.