Preparing for Multiculturalism and Global Community

The original post of this was featured in the Summer 2014 Newsletter Edition of the Maryland Chapter of the American Planning Association: http://www.marylandapa.org/newsletters/APA_Newsletter_Summer2014.pdf

This past spring, I was invited to sit on a panel for a presentation entitled Rising Above: Preparing for Multiculturalism and the Global Community. The panel was hosted by the University of Maryland’s Urban Studies and Planning Program and was set to include US Congressman John Garamendi (CA-3) and the Peace Corps Associate Director for the Office of Volunteer Recruitment and Selection, Helen Lowman. The program discussed the Peace Corps experience in the context of a “world that is increasingly interconnected and multicultural.” As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer myself (RPCV, South Africa, 2008-2010), I addressed how my time in the Peace Corps has shaped my work as a planner. (I currently work at the Maryland Department of Planning (MDP) and teach Sustainable Urban Planning at George Washington University).
I spoke of likening my experiences working on a poultry project for income generation in a rural South African village to my work conducted from a 7^th floor office building in downtown Baltimore and, surprisingly, it was not difficult.

Admittedly I have not worked in the planning profession long enough to know all the intricacies involved in different levels of planning (does one ever?), but so far I have been struck by 2 clear divisions within the public field of planning (I’ll exclude the private sector for the purposes of this article).

You have the community planners. These are the grassroots planners, the weekly evening community meetings, the routine presentations in front of the Planning Commission, the Architectural Design Committees. This is what we were in Peace Corps. Working in the “Community Development” program in South Africa was “grassroots planning.” Different stakeholders but similar roles and similar goals. Consensus, progress, betterment.

Then you have the policy planners. These are the planners often in the larger office buildings in the larger towns and cities. The state planners, the regional planners, the environmental planners, and so on. It is a different view from up there. Lifted out of the grassroots; out of the triage. The rewards can be more demographically widespread but also can be felt less immediately. Less intimately.

The community planner. In South Africa, this is what I did.

The policy planner. At MDP, this is what I do.

And although Peace Corps is more immediately linked with the grassroots community aspect, the experience helped me with both ‘divisions’ of planning. This brings up the adage that the more familiar you are with something, the more comfortable you become. But I am not referring to being uncomfortable due to fear, ignorance, or insecurity. It is simply being uncomfortable because, admittedly, you have no idea what that other way of life entails. You may think you know, but that thought is imagination masquerading as knowledge. Imagination isn’t knowledge. And imagination definitely is not a substitute for experience.

So Peace Corps gave me the opportunity to experience what I previously could have only, in the crudest way, imagined. I could never have known what living life was like in rural South Africa with only dirt roads, bath and drinking water hauled by donkey carts, and no chance of ever going to college. How could I possibly draft a plan for life like that? And yet as planners, we are often tasked with doing just that.

It does catch me when I work on policy affecting farmers in rural eastern shore or landowners in western Maryland counties. I initially followed the notion that residents could, armed with the right distillation of knowledge, see the logic within nearly every policy. I mean – sure the logic I have learned in graduate school and on the job seems clear to me. But then again – I’m nowhere near the experiences of most of Marylanders. I have never even owned any land – let alone relied on multiple acres of it to support my family for the next 10 years ad infinitum. I have never lived amid mountains or in an area where my neighbors and I live on separate 10-acre lots.

And from this there is the instructional takeaway gleaned from a Peace Corps experience applicable to planning. That is, in Peace Corps – as in planning – imagining the situation or focus area beforehand does not always end up being particularly helpful. It did me little good to plan for a rural village before I recognized the people’s perspective living in that village every day. It does me little to imagine life on a 10-acre plot in a single-family home. So the situation is far less critical than the perspective of one living within that situation. Planning should not just involve imagining a situation/place/environment and then planning for that said locale. Rather it should focus more heavily on perspective.

To put it simply it is not enough to imagine a situation. It is far more useful to imagine the person in that situation. We can’t always experience all that we plan for but we can do a better job of adding the human perspective to the focus area for which we plan.

As Peace Corps has recently been in the spotlight for a tragic death of a teacher in China and volunteers pulled for the Ebola outbreak in western Africa, it is worth shining a light on some of the positive takeaways from the program. In my experience it helped me recognize 2 distinct aspects of planning and prepare for both aspects with a deeper perspective.