I go through a lot of items in a day, as you might have noticed, and select what I think fits Price Tags. (Your contributions are welcome too.) Occasionally I come across pieces that I think stand out above the rest. Here’s one:
Engineering’s echo chamber – Charles Marohn takes on the engineering profession:
America’s engineering profession is deluding itself. In their own propaganda echo chamber, they are blaming society for the messes they helped create and have perpetuated. They say we are spoiled. Short sighted. Clueless. They don’t understand why we don’t open up our checkbooks to their “no-brainer” solutions. This internal dialog is dangerous. It is weakening the profession. Some genuine internal scrutiny is long overdue.
I’m not the only fan of Charles Marohn. Neil Salmon writes:
There’s a danger of just reporting and retweeting everything Chuck Marohn writes, it’s all so good! This is basically a variation on “how do you get a man to believe something when his job depends on him not believing it?”.My kneejerk response to unsustainable planning has been “sack all the boomer bureaucrats”, but of course you’d lose a lot of good knowledge that way and it’s politically infeasible.The new grads I meet from SFU Cities, SCARP etc. seem to get smartcode transects, complete streets, etc. Maybe the bigger danger is they become “re-educated” in the workplace, and end up adopting the old boomer playbooks so as not to rock the boat. [Another Marohn piece: Can Baby Boomers be part of the solution?]:“Last week at a Curbside Chat, I was introduced to a former council member from a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. He told me that he had been invited to address a gathering of civil engineers and, at the end his talk, he played our Conversation with an Engineer video. According to him there were two reactions. The younger engineers laughed hysterically while the older engineers sat straight-faced with their arms crossed. That observation tracked with my experience as well.”
“The younger engineers laughed hysterically while the older engineers sat straight-faced with their arms crossed. That observation tracked with my experience as well.”
I am just wondering what would happen if someone attending a meeting of Vancouver and district planners and urbanists were to ridicule the pieties and shibboleths and received doctrines of that group?