I hold a deep disdain for engineers that participate in urban planning. While yes, I can acknowledge that these roles are necessary in certain aspects of how a city is made and functions, I resent how the role has become over-considered and often pedestalized as the arbiter of the city.
It is, like so many things in U.S. society, an extension of patriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalistic ideology. Traditionally a white male dominated sector in the U.S., engineering feels like the intellectual manifestation of a person that was invited to a vegan potluck and gets offended when nobody eats their chicken casserole. They technically brought food, but it didn’t function for any of the attendees but themself.
The air of condescension around civil engineers is putrid and I’m afraid that because of my direct exposure to them through civil service, I may never trust one again.
At a breakout session during a traffic safety symposium, someone was presenting a program that creates temporary physical changes on roads where a fatality had occurred in order to reduce speeds. An engineer scoffed at the idea of their designs being critiqued during this breakout after a child on their bicycle was struck and killed by a car and the presenter proposed implementing their idea on that road.
Rather than considering how the humans actually utilize the space, the engineers in the room vilify the individual driver as “user error” in an attempt to protect the design.
They posit over and over again that these kinds of outcomes are not a pathological product of the road’s design but rather misuse of the design by an individual actor. In that same breath, they will decry that the sole purpose of their job is to anticipate human behavior and design around it.
Unsurprisingly blind to the contradiction, engineers will double-down on this cognitive dissonance and spew data at their assailant (you know, a mom that just lost their child) confusing them while strengthening their position as intellectually and morally superior to not only that person, but the outcome of their design.
This kind of perspective is inherently dehumanizing. It detaches the engineer from any accountability for their work and deepens the gap of understanding between those that use the street and those that design the street.
Engineers exist in a satirical class of elitism, propped up by a credentialist system. The ethos seems to orbit around “nobody outside of the field understands how things actually work nor do they have the capacity to learn.” This is damaging to urban spaces because it essentially defies the very thing that makes the space what it is – population density.
The hubris of a person to try and design spaces for human use without meaningful social competence is both laughable and scary. Laughable because it’s ridiculous for a person that’s detached from a socio-spatial element (e.g. a neighborhood) to deem it a blight and attempt to “fix” it. It’s scary because it happens all the time.
This thinking leads to single-use spaces, harsh zoning restrictions and transit infrastructure that prioritizes single-destination trips. These systemic practices breed isolation, homogeneity and wasted time and space.
From a bird’s eye view, cities seem like they would benefit from a standardized application of development, but once the bird comes down to the street that perspective changes. An engineer’s definition of “functioning” isn’t the same as a 16 year old boy walking home from school on a rainy afternoon. The engineer’s perspective is prioritized even though the teenager has to navigate the space.
There’s definitely a balance that can be struck between the two viewpoints, as they’re not necessarily opposing. Both want the space to “function” but the distribution of power is uneven and unchecked.
