There is an important book on the horizon, The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Placemaking, coming out in November by my friend and colleague Eran Ben-Joseph. It explores the rise of standards in urban planning, particularly after the Second World War. This is a topic of great interest — and great aggravation — to me.

Eran has much more reasonable goals than I — to improve the way that we build suburbs. Without question, he is right. I have a much less practical and much more revolutionary (and therefore impractical) goal: the rid ourselves of standards — all standards, everywhere — standardized tests, standardized suburbs, standardized healthcare, all of it. To me, standards are the mythic faith of Modernity — the belief that if everything, everywhere is the same, all is well.

From a physical point of view, by now most designers and planners realize that the standards currently on the books in most cities are terrible. Nobody really knows where they come from and nobody is critical enough to think about changing them. At this point, standards are tools to encourage NIMBYism and protectionism — a crutch upon which the threat of litigation rests. When I think of neighborhoods I like, suburban or highly urban in character, they are not standardized. They are diverse (which, by definition, is in opposition to standardization). Think about my old ‘hood, the Plateau in Montreal. In this process of writing their new ‘Official Plan’, Montreal planners consulted some of the leading planners in the city. What they told the city is telling: don’t touch it! You see, the Plateau is great precisely because it has grown with only the most basic of zoning requirements. And it is *the* place to live in Montreal (as far as I’m concerned) — where French and English come together, where live, work and play all co-exist in a wonderful sense of place and neighborliness.

Even those (or especially those) with good intentions to ‘fix healthcare’ (in Canada) or ‘fix education’ (in the U.S.) think that standardization is a good thing. The argument is that equality is a good thing. It is. But standards don’t lead to equality – they lead to the lowest common denominator. Does anyone seriously think that standardized testing raises education standards? (even those that like it generally see it as a means to end) Canada doesn’t use standardized tests to evaluate students (for university admission), yet Canadian students, when stacked head-to-head against American students most often perform better (even the standardized tests prove that, ironically!) I, for one, shun standardized tests (just check out my less-than-wonderful GRE scores — the only standardized test I have ever taken). There is a mind-set to standard tests which is anethema to intelligent thought. They remove the test-taker’s ability to demonstrate critical thought. Likewise, standardizing healthcare from province-to-province is also problematic. The conditions are different across regions.

Standardization is a crutch to remove personal judgment. The problem is, once you develop a standard, that becomes the minimum expected outcome. Teachers educate students not how to think, but how to pass the particular standardized test. Minimum scores determine a teacher’s and a school’s competence. So it is with the build environment. Standards mean all streets are laid out according to the size of fire trucks, without regard to topography or natural landscape.

Interestingly, there are those would would solve the problem of bad standards but simply designing good standards. New urbanists strongly believe in standards — only ones that produce traditional environments. While this might result in better urban form, it rarely results in a diverse and engaging place (and sadly results in traditional design that lacks the care and cost that authetic detailing requires).

Diversity and plurality are good things. Fear of such things — by lenders, by homeowners, by policymakers and politicians — leads us to accept standardization. In the twenty-first century of increasing diversity (of all kinds), surely we can leave standardization back in the twentieth-century and see it for what it was: a nice try but one with more negatives than positives.

Kinsella points out a new poll done by Ipsos that looks at the impact of blogs on media and public opinion. 42% of folks read blogs. Not bad. But the profile is quite stereotypical: men, higher educated, wealthier, and younger. I can’t help but wonder if the blogosphere is polarizing the information gap between rich and poor, between a class of higher-educated yuppies and the everyday folks doing *real* work (i.e. working folks). I mean, how can it not?

Blogs have created a highly informal but well-penetrated network of people and sources across disciplines, across time and space, between generations, etc. It has also de-centralized information content, from a few corporate-backed major fee-based publications to a diverse cacophony of individual actors adding depth to public debate. More importantly, it is a self-regulated affair. Instead of an ‘expert’ deciding what is and is not truth, politically-correct, or otherwise worthy, blogging relies on a purely market-based editorical review — if you don’t like or believe what a blogger says, you go elsewhere. Trust is based on the content, not the name-brand (until, of course, some blogs become popular enough to themselves become a name-brand).

Yet, as a market-based system, blogging surely must suffer from the same polarizing effects of most purely capitalist enterprises: those with resources get more resources, those with less resources fall further behind. Think about it: while the rest of us probe the issues ever more deeply, escaping the abyss that is mainstream media, the non-blogging folks (who are, as the polling suggests, less well-off, more working class and with less education) still must consume the censored drivel eminating from the mainstream presses. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and the main networks have become so uncritical that any reliance on them for your chief source of news inevitably leaves you with an information deficit compared to those connected to the blogosphere.

There are important and troubling consequences of this trend. What can we do as bloggers to ensure we aren’t preaching to the choir, but rather informing those ’round-the-cool talks in the lunchroom? At present, the barrier to entry is high: you need 1) time (to surf down your vast blogroll), 2) technology (internet access and a platform to view the content, either computer, cellphone, or PDA) and 3) money (to acquire #1 and #2). It is surely easier to pick up the local paper now-and-then (or delivered to your door and read over your Cheerios). RSS makes it more accessible to those of us online, but the barriers to entry are still there for those that don’t have #1-3 above. Tapping into the ever-growing digital presence in public spaces (think: Times Square) might be possible, but with ClearChannel and other corporate entities controlling content, it is difficult.

So — a call to all bloggers: how do we ensure we are not exacerbating the information gap between rich and poor? It’s an open question and I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

In their op-ed piece (121kb PDF, opens in new window) for the MSTE newsletter Connect, John Olson and Manfred Lang claim that science education fails to tie ‘scientific thinking’ to the larger political, moral and societal by-products of scientific production. They say that science education emphasizes not only the superiority of rational thought, but thought that places individual (and narrow-minded) advances ahead of seeing the ‘bigger picture’. This is an important thing is remind ourselves.

This piece also hits on a more fundamental epistemological question for science (and most other ‘left brain’ endeavors) that leaves us with something of paradox. Olson/Lang suggest moving away from the ‘individualism, competition and isolation” that dominate current science education and research towards a culture of “democratic leadership and participatory decision-making” – presumably a kind of Aristotelian science that hopefully results in a greater moral grounding by building a cross- disciplinary community of scholars (and surely we need more of that). But the very episteme of modern science (and Modernity generally) has been to cast aside subjectivity (of the individual scientist) in favor of objectivity and rational thought.

If ‘scientism’ (the notion that rational scientific thought is inherently superior to other forms of knowing) is, in part, to blame for failing to understand the moral implications of science, then the solution surely lies not only in raising awareness of such issues in the classroom (through curriculum and didactics, as Olson and Lang suggest), but also by re-examining the very epistemology of science that places rationality and objectivity ahead of creativity and subjectivity.

It is not entirely clear whether the Olson/Lang call for less ‘individualism’ and more ‘participatory decision-making’ is in the products or methods of science and science education. I would make a distinction between the two. I would argue that we need more individualism in scientific methods – to not only ensure the scientist is bringing his or her own political and social conscience to the table but also to increase the creative potential of science. That is, to bring subjectivity back into the equation – to dispel the notion that true objectivity is possible or even desirable. That being said, we simultaneously need to shift the products of science away from individual goals towards their potential to address shared responsibilities (Taylor’s instrumentalism). So, we need both more and less individualism. Moreover, rather than merely a ‘science plus’ – the usual science methods plus healthy discussions about societal implications – we need to re-think the very nature of the Modern rational epistemology upon which science rests.