That's really interesting Spencer. My mom actually worked for the Annie E. Casey Foundation for about three years or so. I'll have to ask her what she knew about this. Sounds like they took the right steps to make sure that the people were well taken care of. You can't please everyone, but it's refreshing to see that they made the attempt to please as many as possible. From my understanding, Baltimore has a ton of areas that can use assistance like this. I'd definitely like to learn more about it.

I agree with you Frank. Advocacy planning is definitely not a pointless style of planning. I can definitely see the usefulness of it. As I read your post, I was thinking of commenting exactly something along the lines of what Brad just said. Advocacy planning looks like it can be very good in the right doses. Too much of anything is bad, right? Well, it seems to apply in this circumstance. I do see how it could stymie smart growth however, especially if it is not the popular thing to do in some parts of the country.

Brad, You have great points! I completely agree that planners need to take the lead but seek out the input of locals, whatever organization or person that may be. I don't think that it should be too hard for a planner to get to know specifics about a community. Of course, to satisfy everyone is essentially impossible, but we should get as many people to the table as possible while educating the best we can about the basics of planning. Leaving it completely to the 'locals' makes a planner's job moot. You just cant leave every portion of the city to the locals or there would be no planning... essentially regressing to an age without planning. I also believe that communities are organic. They can't be thought of as a machine with a 'one size fits all' mentality. Individuality is important to people, it is similarly important to a city for aesthetic reasons. But even without the aesthetic in mind, 'one size fits all' doesn't take into account events that effect economy, not to mention all of the potentially unforeseeable problems. You just can't predict everything, attempting to is the setup of failure.

Trevor, Good point about rural lifestyles in relation to sustainability. The excerpt can over simplify the issue. However, the point wasn't to bash all rural living, I am simply referring to the 'average suburban lifestyle'. I lived in the suburbs of Centennial during high school for five years. We were a family of five with five cars to cope with the distances of travel that suburban life presents. Average suburban homes are huge energy hogs. We had a big yard, but there was no food being produced, just grass and landscaping and that takes a lot of unsustainable maintenance. This is the average suburban lifestyle. A farm/ranch is a completely different story. So, suburban lifestyles do not compare to rural farm/ranch lifestyles in many ways. If every Manhattanite were to live like an 'average suburban' it would be less sustainable, unless you want to turn everyone's front yard into a garden... but that's not average and it wasn't the point. Everyone has their own views and goals personally and professionally, I'm not sure that there is a perfect answer for ways around this. For me, I don't think that I could work for a client that wants something that I don't agree with if I were a consultant. But you gotta get paid right? So, hopefully you can find someone that shares your beliefs...

Correction: New York City is more populous than ALL BUT eleven states, but if it were a state, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.

Ashley, I really enjoyed the stories about Sao Paolo, those are great examples! I agree completely that the pluralist perspective is the way to go. But, let me play Devil's Advocate for a second and ask you what the best perspective is when it comes to sustainability? For example, suburbs are unsustainable, but what if everyone wanted to live at the same density as the suburbs? Say every one in New York City wanted to live like the ‘typical suburban American’. They would cover the six New England States, New Jersey, and Delaware. What do you do then? Do we continue to plan unsustainable because the majority wants to? An excerpt from a paper I wrote last semester: To many the thought of Manhattan is the most unsustainable place in America, but the fact is that Manhattan is the greenest city area in the entire country! Many people there do their shopping on foot, use public transportation over personal travel, they don’t have lawns to water, and they have smaller residences which result in less energy being used to maintain it (Owen, p. 8). The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline that the country hasn’t matched as a whole since the mid-1920’s. New York City is more populous than eleven states, but if it were a state, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use. The average New Yorker generates 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, which is less than 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tons. Owen, D. (2009). Green Metropolis: why living smaller, living closer, and driving less are the keys to sustainability. New York: Penguin.

Ashley, Thanks for the response! It just seems that the 'have not's' get even less of a fair deal in the modernist approach. It allows for too small of a group to make decisions that could be bad for other people. The 'group of modernists' could have good intentions, but it's most likely that the less fortunate groups would have representation. This leaves room for reinforcement of social problems.