I was doing a search that I sometimes do on Google, “Kevin Lynch video,” and the internet responded, for the first time, with a hit. The planner, writer, and thinker about cities is a hero of mine. I’ve written about him often and his influence on me and on the planning profession and practice in general. The Southern California Institute of Architecture has posted an almost hour long interview with Kevin Lynch videotaped in 1980 after Lynch had achieved  notoriety in the planning world. I can’t embed the video, but you can connect to the SCI page here.

The interview is worth watching if you are a planner or just interested in the views of one of the most influential planners in the last half of the 20th century. First of all, I recognize that Lynch and I would probably have some good arguments about market forces and development. Lynch starts the interview covering his childhood and youth as part of an old Irish Catholic family in Chicago “wrapped around the questions of socialism . . . in the United States.” Lynch says that one of the most important events that shaped his early views was the Spanish Civil War, a conflict between Nationalist and Republican forces that became an international struggle between forces of Fascism and Socialism.

He got interested in architecture because of a 7th grade teacher that encouraged him to study ancient Egyptian architecture. He ended up going to Yale which he found to be too conservative; he said he “got disgusted and left.” He went on to study with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin for a year and a half before leaving after feeling “swallowed up” in the great man’s shadow. Wright wasn’t happy at the young Lynch’s departure, and  Lynch describes how Wright cursed at him for leaving.

There is a lot more great stuff in the interview and I won’t ruin it by describing it all. But one gets a palpable sense of frustration in Lynch in the interview, and not just because of the interviewer (who can be heard saying “wow” at one point). Lynch was a seminal thinker in urban planning because he saw that planning was not an isolated academic or aesthetic exercise, but a powerful social, economic, and political tool capable of dislocation of people but also allowing them to have “more meaningful lives.” But it seemed like he felt too often the work of good planning was squeezed by government and market forces.

Today, Lynch’s ideal of including the public in planning seems obvious. And of course planning is political and social. But these ideas are accepted as a fact largely because of the work of Lynch and others to transform planning from government bureaucrats drawing vast boulevards on easels in government offices to engaging with actual people and residents to understand how their city works. He points out in the interview how a plan for new government office started out one way but ended up entirely something different. “Everything gets changed,” Lynch says over and over again in the interview, and he seems to think that’s a good thing.

Lynch believed in listening to neighborhoods because he thought engaging them would lead to better cities. At one point in the interview he says:

The most interesting movement in planning today is that of neighborhood planning; that it’s been mostly a reaction against disaster, you know, against an expressway or redevelopment or what have you. But we’re beginning to see a resurgence of the neighborhood in this country and it’s beginning to move from just a negative, a veto against things into positive action and positive planning.

As I pointed out in a recent post, neighborhood planning ain’t what it used to be. Somehow Lynch’s dream of planning becoming a part of a healthy part of the democratic process went wrong. Today, in Seattle at least, we have litigious and petitioning neighbors determined to stop growth and change even going as far as to propose moratoriums on growth and new housing. What’s next, sending new jobs to Bellevue. Ummm, well, yes. I think if Lynch saw what many neighborhoods are doing today, he’d see it as undemocratic, closing down the future in favor of preserving the past for a small group of people who happened to have gotten here first.