Tag Archives: Embedded Planning
Embedded Planning Op-Ed Publishes in APA’s Planning Magazine, Oct 2018
We Cannot Plan From Our Desks.
Planning practioners, students, and professors: WE CANNOT PLAN FROM OUR DESKS.
We need to get out there and connect.
#EmbeddedPlanning praxis means planning in streets, not from the comfort of your desk.
My op-ed publishes in APA’s Planning Magazine #PlanMag October 2018, just in time for #PlanningMonth.
Eureka moment for Embedded Planning
I’m writing an invited op-ed on Embedded Planning. It’s a challenging but rewarding exercise. This has been an amorphous idea swirling in my head for years. I knew what it was intuitively, but I hadn’t defined it. This op-ed is pushing me to define, outline, & explain the benefits of my #EmbeddedPlanning praxis.
The piece draws on my ideas developed over 12 years doing urban planning on-the-ground, from my #MLIS experience in which I regularly wrote about librarians breaking free from the reference desk to do LIS work out in the neighborhood, & from my speaking tour on the Medina Family #ADU saga.
My most fruitful thinking on this op-ed has been away from a desk. On Thursday morning, stuck in #LosAngeles traffic, I had a eureka! moment about the title of my public talk, “A Matter of Necessity”: Understanding Informal Housing through Storytelling. The reason I can tell the Medina Family story is because I earned their trust, at their doorstep, through my Embedded Planning praxis.
Thus far I’ve delivered the Medina Family ADU talk at CSUN, Woodbury University, Cal Poly Pomona, UCLA Luskin, & the American Planning Association #NPC18 Conference in New Orleans under the “Storytelling” title. It’s high time for an update. It’s time to revise my title to underscore that the lessons learned result from Embedded Planning.
Henceforth the title of my talk on the Medina Family ADU story is:
“A Matter of Necessity”: Understanding Informal Housing through Embedded Planning
Only through Embedded Planning do we arrive at my thesis: “Behind every informal unit there’s a story to tell, a human dimension that needs light.”
Consider this page 1 of my #manifesto nailed to the Planning Department’s door.
Read my op-ed, “We Cannot Plan From Our Desks”, in APA’s Planning Magazine #PlanMag October 2018 issue. Just in time for #PlanningMonth.
In this editorial I outline the tenets and benefits of #EmbeddedPlanning. This is my opening salvo to the planning field arguing for Embedded Planning praxis, what I describe as planning in the streets, over orthodox, desk-bound practice.
I ground Embedded Planning in the real life example of the Medina Family ADU Saga in the South Central Los Angeles community of Florence-Firestone. In my current speaking tour, “A Matter of Necessity:” Understanding Informal Housing through Embedded Planning, I’m sharing the family’s difficult first lesson in Planning and Zoning, and my inner conflict with the outcome. I can tell the Medinas’ story because I earned their trust, at their doorstep.