November 22

Alfonso Vegara
President,Fundación Metrópoli

Alfonso Vegara is an Architect, Economist and Sociologist and earned a PhD in City and Regional Planning. He is the founder and President of the Fundación Metrópoli, fellow and Trustee of the Eisenhower Foundation. He has taught architecture and planning at the Universities of Madrid, Navarra and Pennsylvania School of Design. He has also worked as an advisor to the Government of Singapore for the One North Project, as well as Cities as Curitiba, Dublin, Bilbao, Casablanca, Sydney, etc. From 2002-2005 he was President of ISOCARP, The International Society of City and Regional Planners. In 2006 he received the European City and Regional Planning Award and in 2007 the Jaime I Award on Planning, Landscape and Sustainability delivered by the King of Spain. His research on Urban Planning has been presented in the book “Territorios Inteligentes”.

FUNDACIÓN METRÓPOLI

Fundación Metrópoli is an international organisation, at the forefront of a new generation of “intellectual capital institutions” that aspires to contribute to the innovation and development of cities and regions through the research, sharing and implementation of knowledge, and with the objective of building a sustainable future. The aim of the Fundación is to be a catalyst for the positive transformation of cities and landscapes in the 21st century.

Mission: to invent private projects that will promote a sustainable future.
Eisenhower fellowship network
The Urban Land Institute

3 Programs:
Research
Innovation: new ideas
Incubation: ideas to reality --> creating new companies or agencies

Formed the Mayors institute to get mayors together.

Why is designing a project in the desert a good idea?

ASMOA


Funding: Got funding from foundations and universities from other countries

Not competitive with traditional planning firms

collaborators: give ideas and connections

always find a component of access that should be elevated to give the area competitive access.

do not do a cookie cutter design
dialogue with the landscape
development they call eco: never one use. always mixed use/mixed income.

background in architecture, economics, and political science.

Collaborate!

Understand institutions and their interconnections with the region

Place as competitiveness



Take out one idea from each class and try to see if they coordinate with the principles. Be and advocate!

Ramando

What are the keys to building creativity: be in a space where you like what you are doing, a space that is nurturing, reward people through other means,

professor:
movtivating yourself to a hostile response or a boring response
preserver
stay motivated, know what you are doing has value

Creativity in a leadership position is about managing your own creativity in a democracy.
Negotiation: mutual gain
A lot of value left un-gained because of the processes we use to make decision. Human happiness can be much much greater if we were all really successful negotiators. Thereby, don't be secretive with your wants because otherwise you are eliminating the possibility of discovering some benefits that could have been on the negotiating table.

take no more than 9 months, people lose motivation

powerful proposal, brought to the political group of selectmen, they said no. he stayed motivated. he stayed committed. He said that was great feedback, proposed a blue ribbon commission, it should include the most severe critics, improve the plan and bring it back, six more months, created incentives for local plans rather than making them mandatory (WHAT WERE THE INCENTIVES). Redrafted the legislation, the selectmen said no again, a miracle happened, should their be a new regional planning law, a county charter and a moratorium?

planning is an unnatural act that needs to be nurtured.

don't fallow your job description.
get the job and make something of it.
you should quit if there is no hope.
do what you want. show up to meetings, make suggestions, organizations with technical political power that is going unused, but you can harness that. people like that attention. don't just follow your job description. think outside the job description.


scratch your back if you scratch ours, get politicians involved so you have political support. Know when to compromise, know when to back off, nurture and support your staff.

don't keep regular hours.

To be a leader you need the two Ms: Motivation and Means
Motivation: purpose, will power
Means: organizations, you need a structure for implementing your idea, someone has to do some homework, someone has to crunch the numbers.

Austin Tobin: Executive Director of Port Authority
Go getter
Gave credit to his staff when they were initiating projects

Brown Article:
the crucial variable is the density of administration confidence

Bureaucratic organizations are built to resist innovation.

Amanda. Chair NYC City Planning Commission.

You need every agency on board to accomplish something.
Benchmarks

NYC
Global City
Sustainable City
City of Neighborhoods (5 b0roughs, 188 neighborhoods)
Comprehensive Planning for Significant Sites
Vibrant Waterfronts and Public Open Space
Urban design excellence (good economic development)

The mayor of NY cannot be involved in lower Manhattan. What is the motive for that?

No extra land-->tough decisions!

Howard White is her mentor (public open spaces)

palin #2

Gladwell: cases and methods to build leadership.
Henton: guide for planners

Leaders/managers:
responsible, not going to please everybody, but listen to everyone first.

Gary Hack
What we are really talking about today is managing complex organizations and networks. Gary Hack has managed Penn and through his consulting work he's been inolved in complex planning projects such as the Hudson River Park.

Gary's lead a number of different companies and organizations. He harbors beliefs about flat/anti hierarchical management organization. But he's found that people look for someone to take the lead and guide them. What was wrong with his conception was that he saw leaders in a particular way--command and control type of regulation. Its a contextual issue.

Anecdote:
In the 1980s he was the head of a planning consulting firm in Boston and was given the west side redevelopment project in Manhattan.

Uses Burnham as an exampe of comiling ideas that are sitting out there in the public.
What got implemented rested on their ability to create organizations/commissions that carried out the stuff.

Making a plan is making an implementation plan for that plan.

Every week Burnham held a luncheon. They would eat and then he would role out his plan and talk to everyone and listen to their opinions.

Leadership is to listen to the ideas and then persuade everyone to believe in your compilation and then come up with committees to carry it out-->orchestration

leading from the middle: you realize you are not going to be the star in the organization. your job is to make the star people stars.

Five important things that effective leaders learn how to do:

1. Get agreement and buy in to the essentials
1. have a shared view of all the people in terms of goals and strategies
2. naming and framing
2. Read and make judgments of the environment and your expertise
3. Be able to explain the purposes, reasing and strategy.
1. stump speech
2. You should never have more than five things tha you are doing at one time.
4. You have to be able to parce the world into short term things we have to do.
5. The leader of the organization can do almost nothing by his/herself
1. get to know the people you work with
2. recognize their accomplishments
3. recognizing their birthdays and families
4. sending them unexpected notes and emails

School needs to be redone: PennDesign

1. we need a better fine arts department
2. we need to go digital
3. international
   
4. the strength of penn is that we always have strong practitioners as faculty members
5. studios/dual degrees/interdisciplinary resources

have viewson what makes a good city
have views on what makes good architecture
have some ideas of a good approach
research former ideas

Managers and Leaders: Are They Different? by Abraham Zaleznik

Three human risks involving power:

"Leadership requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people. Power in the hands of an individual entails human risks: first, the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate results; the second, the risk of ignoring the many different ways people can legitimately accumulate power; and third, the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power."

Conservatism can lead to inertia and this is how the position of manager formed.

• rationality and control
• efficiency
• deliverables
• persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability, tolerance, and understanding.

Three Q's

1. Are leaders only heroic figures?
2. Do you need a visionary to be a leader?
3. "...do managers perpetuate group conflicts instead of reforming them into broader desires and goals?"

Attitudes Towards Goals

• Active rather than reactive towards goals
  

Conceptions of Work

• limit options for others
• conversely, leaders provide options, though they need not be realistic

Relations with others

• avoid solitary activity
• it makes them nervous
• low level of emotion
• balances power
• relate to people according the their role rather than an intuitive, empathetic way, like leaders
  
• 
  

Class notes/September 10: How does someone become a leader?

Defining Leadership

1. Burns

• you need vision
• you need resources

2. Andy Altman (Philly's Dept. Planner)

• tells a story about his family, Germantown/CC/South Philly --> contrasts --> questions
• Allen Jacobs 'Making Neighborhoods Work' Israel/Palestinian neighborhoods in Jeru
• Can you take a government institution and use policy to make change? Vision, ideas, and bureaucratic authority==>government.
• Driven by his question, if there is a moment where change is possible--I'll take it.
• Really learned leadership in LA when given a lot of authority in policy, saw how decisions were made, who has what power, how you think about issues, and how you get things done.
• Two lessons: planners need to have ideas (not just reactionary), understand the politics.
• Bloods and the Cripps planning meeting
• seize the moment
• the mayor/dept mayor, the vision, and the moment

Philadelphia

• Rendell
• go to where the problems are
• The 'Challenge'
  
• Urban America
• Is this Philadelphia's moment?
• Political leadership
• no market
• appetite/eagerness towards planning
• Deputy Planning position
• Has charge over the different departments, less time spent convincing ppl of ideas
  
• ideas, implementation, and budget --> now he can put them together.
• right leadership, right structure, and right opportunity
• You must have a strong vision/values/beliefs and you need to move towards that or you will be lost int he day to day.
• in some ways whaat's been most important from where i've connected with most people is your attitude, openness and ability to listen then people like you.
• first meet with everyone you can.

question from Nick on planning and commerce: how do you reconcile planning and commerce?
Altman eats that tension for breakfast. Different interests are always negotiating and forming the physical world. Leadership is important. Nutter is very public about the importance of planning.

Get your mayor out there. The power of words is important.

Alan Greenberger as new head of planning.

Make a business plan; who are you going to talk to? Anticipate questions and implementation.
E. Bacon to Altman: be five years ahead of everyone so when they come to you, you are ready.

*Anacostia waterfront??
Brought developers in on a hot spot on the waterfront and created a plan on a weekend which brought a huge amount of cred.

Position in private sector: 80 acre in Stamford, CT. University funds investing in real estate. Private equity firm, come bring your planning skills to create value on land. Planners add huge value to real estate developments because they can help create successful projects.

Check out the casinos issues with Philadelphia (Harris Steinberg concluded, through visionary exercises, that the casinos are not the best use for the waterfront).

Risk taking --> the Mayor took a huge risk.


Having a professional opinion adds integrity/cred to your position.

The Difference Between Power Wielders and Leaders By George MacGregor Burns

"The two essentials of power are motive and resource."

Weber on power, power "is he probability that one actor witha social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite reistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests."

P equals the power holder and R equals the power recipient. Probability determines the actions of the power recipient. So, Burns asks, what controls the degree of probability?

He explores the role of purpose and determines that a psychological approach is easier to understand. He assumes that power is a relationship that involves intention, and purpose, of both the P and the R. Since he is difficult to paraphrase, I will simply quote:

I view the power process as one in which power holders, possessing certain motives and goals, have the capacity to secure changes in the behavior of respondent, human or animal, and in the environment, by utilizing the resources in their power base, including factors of skill, relative to the targets of their power-wielding and necessary to secure such changes.

Some people enjoy "effectance" (titled so by robert white) which is simply enjoying ones own skills. other people, like Hobbes, Nietzsche and Machiavelli exploit external resources consciously. P's of this type will always choose satisfying their own needs over R's. While some P's seem to have unbridled, or naked, power, they are subject to constraining circumstances at all times.


Leadership and Followership

"Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers. ...Leadership is exercised ina condition of conflict or competition in which leaders contend in appealing to the motive bases of potential followers unlike naked power in which P's do not engage.

Leadership, unlike general power, specifically acknowledges a common goal. Burns argues that this is where real change occurs.

Linkage theory: the mapping of communication and other interrelations among power holders in different spheres (e.g. military, economic)

Burns measures power and leadership by the degree of production of intended effects.


Thus, when Burns summarizes that political elitism grossly confuses power and leadership his former statement becomes clear and well supported.

The Difference Between Power Wielders and Leaders By George MacGregor Burns

"The two essentials of power are motive and resource."

Weber on power, power "is he probability that one actor witha social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite reistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests."

P equals the power holder and R equals the power recipient. Probability determines the actions of the power recipient. So, Burns asks, what controls the degree of probability?

He explores the role of purpose and determines that a psychological approach is easier to understand. He assumes that power is a relationship that involves intention, and purpose, of both the P and the R. Since he is difficult to paraphrase, I will simply quote:

I view the power process as one in which power holders, possessing certain motives and goals, have the capacity to secure changes in the behavior of respondent, human or animal, and in the environment, by utilizing the resources in their power base, including factors of skill, relative to the targets of their power-wielding and necessary to secure such changes.

• Leaders are formed by group systems of political, organizational, and social interaction.
• hegemony (the group) is the ball and chain of leadership, while pointing out new ways, a leader must take into account how a group will generally interpret things
• thereby a leader can become defined by the group
  
• must have a solution
  
• must have an agenda
• must up the ante
• Type I situations
• Offer straight forward, viable and achievable solutions
• Type II situations
• Solutions depending upon the agency of the the individuals (they must assess the trade-offs)
• Type III situations (e.g. cancer)
  
• unclear problem
• no technical fixes available
• must face and make adjustments to harsh realities that go beyond the conceptual problem

The Realm of Public Policy

Adjusting people's attitudes

• Technical Solutions
  
• usually only help narrowly defined situations which is a problem in itself
• Problem-solving process
• Framing
• Task of helping constituents reach their desired outcomes
1. make constituent aware of the fact that leaders can't fix things for them
2. hold steady as constituents begin to face the problem
3. find concrete problems to address
4. manage the process of devising solutions

Conventional Wisdom as a Paradigm of Authority

"Because the expectations associated with authority impose sharp limits on hebavior, having authority constrains leadership."

authority = doing what is expected (does not=) leadership, though the two may overlap