Brave New Planners1

The subject here has very little do with Land Conservation or my activities in Portland

over the past year; instead it’s my reflections upon our daughter’s graduate school

commencement on Friday morning, June 16. Her degree: a two-year Master of Urban and

Regional Planning (MURP) from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, which has been

minting sharp-witted social workers, public policy wonks, and planners for more than 40 years.

Something rang in our daughter’s head when she explored graduate schools three

years ago while still working at her post-college job at NRDC in San

Francisco; maybe a peal of the anti-authoritarian humanism of the late

UCLA Professor John Friedman, who was lured from the University of

Chicago in 1969 to build the Luskin planning program. She (photo, on

right) also loved the climate, the beaches (or at least the idea of broad,

endless close-to-home beaches), the youthful, informal culture and its

restaurants, street food, and music festivals as well as the unmistakable

ethnic and racial diversity of the school and the city, our country’s

largest minority-majority community.

Salmon-brick Royce Hall, Luskin’s commencement venue, dates to 1929 as the largest

of four original classroom buildings for the new UCLA campus. All were designed in the

11thcentury Lombardy Romanesque style, reflecting the similarity between the dry and

scrubby southern California landscape and that of northern Italy.

All used extra-long Roman brick; a material re-adopted in recent

UCLA structures in a reaction to concrete, steel and glass

modernism. An ancient church in Milan was the primary model, but

motifs were borrowed from many European buildings of the

medieval era. Its twin towers, framing the arcaded front of the

central auditorium, have become a campus emblem; its sparkling

blue cambered ceiling spans an 1,800-seat auditorium between the

twin towers. Following a damaging 1994 earthquake, an extensive and hugely renovation

reinforced the structure against future earthquakes and re-tuned the hall’s acoustics for

musical performance rather than speech. Royce serves as the concert venue for the Los

Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Many renowned musicians and other public figures have

performed or given talks at Royce Hall over the eighty-eight years since its completion.

1 This is my first “blog” post on my new personal and professional website https://wesleytward.com, “under

construction,” as they say) and my second on LinkedIn. It’s meant to be a sort of “commencement”, without the

ritual gown and mortarboard of course, but I won’t reject a bouquet of flowers or a scattering of confetti as I toss

my hat into the widening ring of the blogosphere. Comments are welcome.

Royce Hal l

No matter how many times you’ve “walked” in or attended a commencement since the

eighth grade, I’ll bet the opening bars of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, cascading

forth from 600 organ pipes, will lift your head, swell your chest, make your heart pound, and

open tear ducts. This is especially true if we ignore the expansive, Trumpian theme of the

march’s imperial lyrics, much in need of revision.

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free, / How shall we extol thee?

Wider and wider shall thy bounds be set;

God made thee mighty, / Make thee mightier yet.

The Luskin School’s graduates, some 226 Masters and 17 PhDs, represent its three

divisions, Social Work (the largest with 102 Masters), Urban and Regional Planning with 67) and

Public Policy with 59). The program began with the school’s official

greetings to graduates and families, followed by the unusual translation

of the English greetings into the seventeen other languages of the

graduates. In alphabetical order, they were American Sign Language,

Arabic, Armenian, Cambodian, Cantonese, French, Hawaiian, Hebrew,

Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Mixtec, Persian, Spanish, Tagalog,

and Turkish. Presumably to avoid seeming to privilege any language over the others, the

translations were ordered not alphabetically by language but by last name of the graduate

representing each language. All spoke well and clearly, making eye contact with the audience

and projecting voices well (as one would expect so close to Hollywood); some spoke more

quickly than others; some dramatized the words with their language’s signature hand gestures;

some put real passion into their thirty seconds. The greetings made us feel thoroughly

welcomed.

Each of the three divisions had a student speaker professing to change, or at least heal,

the world. All three groups of graduates were remarkably diverse. Taking the last names of the

MURPs as a quick if inadequate proxy, at least 62% of the graduates were men and women of

color. The planners’ student speaker, Carolyn “Caro” Vera, of Guatemalan descent, an effusion

of dark, wavy hair with subtly lightened ends flaring loose below her cap, was the most

entertaining and personal, managing to sound fervent and uncompromising without edging into

humorless stridency. Leaning against the podium with a small I-Pad in her right hand, she began

by “hyping” the audience with a call-and response refrain that brought laughter and loud

applause; she apologized for her use of an I-PAD to keep her on track (“I’m an honest woman”).

In Spanish, she thanked her mother who had “crossed multiple borders by herself at the age of

21” to reach the U.S. She noted that being a first- generation low-income student of color at a

major university was not romantic, it was often traumatizing and belittling. She called upon the

graduates to create change in their profession and the world; to apply a critical perspective on

their predecessors and their profession and not to repeat the profession’s long history of past

mistakes and damaging consequences including the systemic racism that has given form to so

many of our nation’s communities.

Some excerpts from Caro’s speech will give the flavor: “I’m here to

uplift the narrative of low income students of color who have fought to the

very end to cross this stage. It is our duty to advance equity; to support and

uplift communities of color …. We have an opportunity to invalidate and

replace racist housing and planning policies, prevent displacement and

explicitly fight gentrification in this city…. we must insist that “Black Lives

Matter” to us as urban planners – because we for %&#^ing decades (Oh

Jesus, I knew I was going to cuss, sorry, sorry Mom) have advanced urban planning policies that

have had damaging effects on people of color.” Again, loud applause from the audience and

faculty with whoops and hollers from her classmates. She radiated pride and relief as she

acknowledged the applause.

Following the student awards and speakers, Professor David Cohen, the master of these

complex ceremonies, announced an unexpected pause. The commencement speaker, Los

Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a rising political star

(though not a favorite of Luskin School graduates who

had suggested more dynamic and “progressive”

speakers), was delayed and would be arriving as soon

as possible. He was attending a funeral for a Los

Angeles fire-fighter who had died in service – obviously

not something a mayor could miss for a graduation

ceremony even at the city’s leading public university.

Professor Cohen invited the audience to stand, stretch,

use the facilities and enjoy a meditative musical interlude; whereupon, after a six-beat pause,

the impressive Royce organist launched into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overture for Phantom of

the Opera. Some couldn’t resist craning their necks to check the chandelier, not as it turned out,

a feature of this hall. The ceiling cambers with their vibrant night-sky design seemed reassuring

anchored in place.

Garcetti, a graduate of Los Angeles public and private schools, Columbia University and

its Graduate School, and Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, is the city’s first elected Jewish

mayor and second Mexican-American mayor. He served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy

Reserve; married a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, with whom he has an adopted daughter and has

fostered several children. He is a jazz musician and composer and is well-known in finance and

entertainment circles. Elected to the City Council in 2001, he was an

effective and markedly productive councilor in a strong-council form of

city government. As mayor since 2013, he has been a relatively

progressive spokesman for a diverse and vibrant city; a mayor in a huge,

weak-mayor city is like the captain of a container ship – enormous

Caro Vera

Royce Hall Ceiling

Mayor Eric Garcetti

inertia makes it difficult to change course. His “back to basics” approach reminds me of

Boston’s long-term Mayor Menino, dubbed “the urban mechanic.” Unless he gets bogged

down in the next couple of years, we should hear more from Garcetti on the national stage.

Already he is leading a large group of mayors who pledge, despite Trump’s policy, to adhere to

the Paris Climate Agreement. I was surprised that his speech left most people seated, but it

was workmanlike rather than impassioned. Even his claims of personal affiliation with these

diverse graduates failed to inspire. After all, he is the son of the former Los Angeles District

Attorney. And perhaps his invitation to graduates to find jobs with the City of Los Angeles

(which my daughter reports, do not actually exist in the city departments at present) did not

elicit the desired gratitude from his listeners, many of whom will soon be opening their student

loan repayment bills.

Or maybe the audience was saving its cheers and applause for the graduates

themselves, on their individual walks from stage right to stage left, passing one photographer at

the critical moment of shake with one hand and grasp with the other for the beribboned baton

of rolled white paper (to be replaced months later with the official signed diploma) and then

posing briefly for a second photographer before descending those always tricky narrow stairs to

the main level. One especially exuberant bellow – THAT’S MY BROTHER!!! – by a young African

American woman expressed the general good feelings in Royce Hall.

It was a secular ceremony -- no invocation nor benediction – a celebration of personal,

family, and institutional achievement. I recall no flags on stage no references to the Almighty.

The only flowers were the lei’s worn by many of the graduates and the bouquets held

awkwardly by family members for later presentation to their graduates. In that spectacular hall,

there was little need for additional adornment. After the rousing recessional and during a full-

bore Bach fugue, we passed through the Lombardian arcade into the sun’s direct glare flooding

the university’s historic quadrangle for fruit, cheese, hummus, cold cuts, wraps and cookies,

coffee, and punch (alcohol-free except for those few with personal flasks – not I though a cold

beer would have been nice); the festive milling of resplendent faculty and graduates, still

begowned and be-tasseled, with their hoods, “tams”, or “tudors”; the embraces, hugs,

handshakes, fist bumps, photographs, and the efficient return of gowns as soon as they could

be shed in the interest of surviving the blazing sun in that broad, treeless space.

The Dickson Plaza, as the original quadrangle is called, is oriented from east to west,

framed by the four original buildings, with Royce Hall and Haines Hall at the north, Powell

Library and the Humanities Building to the south, and the sparkling Shapiro Fountain at the

western end. UCLA’s playing fields and stadium, so perfectly green that they must be Astroturf,

beyond the fountain at a lower level. Beyond the stadium, the residential towers of this

47,000student university look like their own downtown. My Google Maps show that further to

the west lies West Los Angeles and the tangled canyon-side developments of Westgate and

Brookwood in the Santa Monica hills. Just over a 4-mile walk or a 2-mile drone flight northwest

of UCLA perches the jewel-like Getty Center with its 180-degree view of this throbbing city of

nearly 4 million people in 503 square miles, the second largest city in the U.S by population, the

66th largest city in the world; and, with 14.3 million people, the world’s 25th largest

metropolitan area (central city plus commuting ring).

In this context, Carolyn Vera’s challenge to urban planners seems audacious, even

breathtaking; after all, she’s an admitted millennial from a background of family and personal

struggle, and her context is California, the world’s sixth largest economy and arguably the most

dynamic and diverse urban culture in the U.S. But does her critique and challenge suggest that

her profession can rouse itself and us to face the challenges that we Americans have kicked

down the road for so long? To name a few: growing inequity in income, education, health,

housing, and living conditions; deteriorating infrastructure; persistent discrimination and

segregation in our “advanced” society; the anger and alienation that feeds terrorism; and

climate change which may be accelerating as an existential threat to our way of life, many of

our communities, and even our species. And let’s not forget the nuts-and-bolts issue of

commuter traffic, one of the few well-funded specialties of planning schools and consulting

firms – the daily headache and preoccupation of our urban civilization, consuming much of the

working day for millions of people and contributing mightily to the greenhouse effect.

I don’t want to end this with a political statement or a jeremiad. Above all, I felt glad to

have witnessed an exuberant, good-humored

celebration of young people of intelligence and good

will who had formed an intense, two-year community

marked by its diversity, inclusion, mutual respect,

teamwork, and high aspirations; and whose

graduates would now scatter to the four winds to

practice their widely underappreciated and

misunderstood craft and discipline. As I stood within

the arcade and watched a group of still-robed

graduates cheer as they tossed their mortarboards in

the air, and another group cluster in the relative shade of the Plaza’s southwest corner by the

edge of the glistening fountain (which I thought might soon attract some waders), Miranda’s

closing exclamation from the Tempest came to me:

O wonder . . . . How beauteous mankind is!

O brave new world, That has such people in’t!

After the ceremony, Dickson Plaza

and Powell Library

A semblance of shade, Shapiro Fountain

Photographs: W. T. Ward

Wes Ward Portland, Oregon