Information Sources in Planning: "Smart Growth Online" vs. “Freedom Advocates”

Where there are no facts, sentiment rules.

- Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

In my previous two posts I have set the stage for our
consideration of information sources in planning by arguing for the relevance of
such an effort when it comes to (increasingly controversial) urban planning
issues, and to situate such in terms of recognizing the influence of our world views on
the production and use of informational and built environments. 

Now I would like to demonstrate the application of some of
these themes by undertaking a comparative exercise utilizing recognized
information literacy principles. 

My choice of sources emerges directly from the emerging
attack on smart growth planning from the Tea Party-right,
and is geared towards gaining insights into the nature and quality of the
information used to buttress these respective schools of planning thought as
demonstrated on The Smart Growth Online and Freedom Advocates websites. 

I didn't select these two sites on the basis of previous
evaluation, or a determination that I believe them to be the best (or worst) in
their field. Rather they should be seen as representative, and as the most
likely "hits" for researchers investigating the pros and cons of smart growth
planning. A Google search for "smart growth" reveals that www.smartgrowth.org to be among the
first, general (and non-Wikipedia) source; while someone seeking to link "smart
growth" to the alleged sinister agenda behind "Agenda 21" would surely find
that www.freedomadvocates.org
will be their first hit from a search combining these terms. Another thing to
note as well: my assessments are based on the general nature of the content on
these respective sites, rather than an examination of those organizations with
whom they associate via their links.

We shall be considering these sites in terms of criteria related to authorship and authority (courtesy of the Lesley University Library in Cambridge):

·             
Who
is [are] the author[s]?

·             
What
are their credentials?

·             
Do
they have sufficient authority to speak on the subject?

·             
Are
they up front about their purpose and the site's content?

·             
Do
the authors give credit for the information used?

·             
Is
there any way to reach them?

·             
Is
there an organizational or corporate sponsor?

·             
Is
there a reference list? 

as well as
criteria concerning the overall quality and verifiability of the information:

·             
How current is the information?

·             
Does the content reflect a bias? Is the bias
explicit or hidden?

·             
Does the identity of the author or sponsor
suggest a bias?

·             
How does the bias impact the usefulness of the
information?

According to its website, Smart Growth Online (SGO) represents a
Network aimed at finding 

new ways to grow that
boost the economy, protect the environment, and enhance community vitality. The
Network's partners include environmental groups, historic preservation
organizations, professional organizations, developers, real estate interests;
local and state government entities The Smart Growth Network does not lobby
and does not take on individual development decisions.

We learn here that the Network originated in 1996 with
an official government effort, and comprises a diverse and cross-sectoral array
of organizations, institutions and associations. At the bottom of the homepage is
clearly indicated all the necessary contact information for the Network; in
addition, users can click through to see a list of more than 40 member organizations,
as well as follow to these entities' own websites to contact them and access
their resources. This level and depth of recognition and support indicates a
high degree of credibility.

The Network is upfront about its purpose, stating that it

works to encourage development that
serves the economy, community and the environment. It is a forum for:

Raising public awareness of how growth can improve community
quality of life;
Promoting smart growth best practices;
Developing and sharing information, innovative policies, tools and
ideas; [and]
Cultivating strategies to address barriers to and advance
opportunities for smart growth.

We also learn at the bottom of the homepage that the website
is a project of the National
Center for Appropriate
Technology (NCAT) and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Under "Resources" the site links to reports and webinars
produced by State agencies and other recognized authorities related to urban
development issues. For example, recent links include the Healthy Community
Design Checklist produced by the Healthy Community Design
Initiative through the Department of Health and Human Services. Another recent
document is a fact sheet on Transportation, Development and Environment from
the Federal Highway Administration, every contention of which is supported by
footnotes leading the reader to further resources and documentation.  The "Breaking News" feature similarly
links to external mainstream newspapers and other publications. The site is
also structured to allow users to search for news topics by state and date.

As to the second set of evaluative criteria: While the purpose of the site
is clearly biased towards support the efforts of Network members and others to
work towards smart growth goals in their respective communities, the content
itself can't be said to be biased in a monolithic sense because it is almost
entirely composed of links to external, mainstream information sources, and was
not written expressly for this site. As such, the topics covered are diverse
and range from cycling facilities to economic development to land use planning
to the development of planning tools. Its semantic appropriation of the term
"smart" to describe development that improves livability, quality of life and
affordability is not unique, but is widely accepted and formally adopted at
multiple levels of government and in the planning community. It is also rich
with recent materials; there are ten new reports from February 2012, and the
site appears to be updated on a weekly or semi-weekly basis.

To summarize: what we see in Smart Growth Online is a site that is authoritative (supported by and
links to recognized relevant agencies, departments and professional bodies); current
(there are plenty of new documents and links to recent external news
items); responsible (authorship and contact information are clearly
indicated); and verifiable (site links to all entities involved, and the bulk
of the site content [reports, news] derive from external mainstream sources,
not from the site itself, and therefore presents a common pool of data and
analysis that may be subject to contestation).

Now let's turn to our other example, Freedom Advocates. Originating
as a Bay Area advocacy group (Freedom 21 Santa Cruz) opposed to smart growth,
the site states on the About Us page that it

represents a
cross-section of people from all political parties and backgrounds who are
united in the principles of individual liberty, equal justice and the
constitutional administration of government.

So far, so good. Hard to refute
even – begging the question, could one conceive of an organization called
Freedom Opponents? Yet the page is deliberately non-specific as to what this
"cross section" represents; certainly no reputable organizations are
identified, such as those which are linked to the Smart Growth Network. Rather
than going into any further detail about "us" as one might expect such a page
to do, the text proceeds to describe the Advocates' agenda:

People are born with
unalienable rights and government exists to protect those rights. Rather than
bureaucrats mandating indoctrination programs, parents should direct the terms
of their child's education. Rather than bureaucrats taking the use of private
property, the ideals of private property should be protected by government.

In its pamphlet, "Understanding Sustainable Development
Agenda 21 for the People and Their Public Officials," the case against smart growth and planning is set out in full:

Through Smart
Growth, the infrastructure is being created for a post-private property era in
which human action is subject to centralized government control. With the
combined implementation of Smart Growth and the Wildlands Network, humans will
be caged and the animals will run free (p. 18).

The pamphlet's remarkable claims on page 18-19 regarding the nefarious
objectives of smart growth – for example, that

[t]ransportation
plans [will] reduce the freedom of mobility, forcing people to live near where
they work, and transforming communities into heavily-regulated but
"self-sufficient" feudalistic "transit villages" (p. 18)

are indeed footnoted – but these do not cite an actual
smart growth or sustainability plan, but rather contain further unsupported editorializing on the part of the pamphlet's authors. Where such footnotes do cite mainstream documents, the assertions in the text made about them are utter
misrepresentations, to put it charitably. For example, the authors claim that the
1995 Global Biodiversity Assessment
called for the abolition of private property, when it did no such thing: it
merely recognized that multiple market failures have depleted species diversity
and called for market corrections and full-cost accounting to so that property
owners can "reap the benefits" of
preserving biodiversity!  

From this intellectual closed-loop, it is all too easy to
descend into outright fantasy:

A typical day in the
Orwellian society created by Smart Growth would consist of an
individual waking up in his government provided housing unit, eating
a ration of government-subsidized foods purchased at a government-sanctioned
grocery store, walking his children (if he has any) to the government-run child
care center, boarding government-subsidized public transit to go to his
government job, then returning to his quarters later that evening (p. 19).

To
establish the case that urban planning is destroying Americans' freedom; that
Agenda 21 is the keystone of a conspiracy geared towards implementing a
globalist socialist state; and that public education is facilitating all this
through "mandated indoctrination," the Freedom Advocates website offers
articles, video and audio clips, cartoons,
a 24-slide powerpoint presentation and a "Research Center" all aimed at conflating Agenda 21 with Soviet-style collectivism.

Interestingly,
this "research center" portion of the site does link to PDFs from external and
authoritative sources, such as the Agenda 21 declaration from the 1992 Rio UN
Conference; the 1996 Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide; and a UNEP memo on the
"Green Economy." However, interfiled with these are additional – and not nearly
so authoritative -- documents from ideologically sympathetic individuals,
including an e-book called "the deliberate dumbing down of america" (sic) by Charlotte Iserbyte, which purports to document how "social
engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions
of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a
socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists" (p.
xi). (As a social scientist myself I'm astonished and thrilled to learn that I
had such power!)

Under "Articles" the reader can find such ideologically-loaded
topic headings as "Family Autonomy" "Junk Science" "Illegitimate Government"
"Police State" and, of course, "Planning – Smart Growth." Similar to Smart Growth Online, much
of this content appears to derive from external sources; however, unlike SGO,
the verifiability of these sources is decidedly inconsistent. Where verifiable
authorship information exists at the end of these articles, they are generally
to external but sympathetic advocacy groups of uncertain authority (such as the
"Center for Intelligent Growth" which [we are helpfully told] is "located in
the State of Arizona"
but apparently has no website of its own). More often than not, however, all
the reader has to go on is a name but cannot learn any further information
about the authors, their credentials or even their email addresses. In some
cases there are links to an author's own personal websites, where their books
and DVDs are for sale. Some of the articles are signed by "Freedom Advocates"
but this of course doesn't indicate to whom this refers.

In a few cases, some author information is provided. For
example, Henry Lamb, who posted "Global Warming Hypocricy" claims to have
founded "The Environmental Conservation Organization", but again, a series of
searches leads only to dead links, or to the websites of other so-called
"property rights" organizations. 

By far the sketchiest attribution is to an author indicated
only as "Administrator", who posted the article "Smart Growth Parallels Russian Soviet
Planning." This author simply copied and pasted the text of the Soviet-era articles "What
Will Our Future Cities Look Like?" by A. Obraztsov and "The Microdistrict and
New Living Conditions" by A. Zhuravlyev and M. Fyodorov, and has left it
entirely to the reader to draw their own (presumably predictable) conclusions
about this alleged correspondence without even a hint of original
analysis. 

This kind of prejudicial thinking is even more evident in
the "Junk Science" category, where the featured authors editorialize against
climate change science based on the assumption that climate change is a hoax
perpetrated for money and power, and then proceed from there. There is no
actual data or analysis to make such a claim; it is simply a given. Yet, such
fallacious reasoning is the essence of Freedom Advocates: planning must be bad,
because the Soviets did it, while public education that offers tools for
critical thinking and promotes environmentalism instead of a steady diet of
American exceptionalism must be "indoctrination."

The
use – and abuse – of semantics is key. Where Smart Growth Online merely
uses the term "smart" as a normative stance on effective, attractive and
affordable city-building, Freedom Advocates assumes an entire suite of beliefs
under the rubric "freedom", whereby any idea running counter to these by
definition constitute tyranny.

The list of Freedom Advocates' Board of Directors reveals only one
individual for whom an informational link is provided: Michael Shaw, an
accountant, tax attorney and businessman who claims to be an "abundance
ecologist." One would think at this point that an internal link describing what
"abundance ecology" actually is might have been in order, but a little digging reveals
on Shaw's other site (Liberty Garden) that it involves 

releas[ing] the potential
productivity and diversity of a landscape [by leaving] an owner  free to engage in rigorous disturbance and
free to pursue a reasoned and creative process of trial and error. This process
would be suited to the choice of each individual and the uniqueness of each
property.

Its
opposite lies in "regulatory approaches" and "hysteria over endangered species"
that "promote state collectivism."

This lack of authority and expertise aside, what is also soon
apparent when scrolling through the lists of articles is how infrequently they
are posted, and how dated most of them actually are. The Smart Growth page, for
example, features articles from January 2012, June 2011, November 2008,
September 2007 and so on. This demonstrates either a pretty weak attention to the issue at hand, or limited organizational capacity.

The "Contact Us" page displays a phone and fax number, but
no address. We do learn, however that the site was hosted by a web company
called Patriot's Web, which states on its site that 

The Patriot's Web takes a stand for
and intends to promote liberty, personal and national sovereignty and the U.S.
Constitution. We also support a Judeo-Christian and Biblical world view. As
such, we are selective in the type of clients we serve Thus, if you are
pro-Sustainable Development, pro-Agenda 21, pro-globalization, anti-property
rights, anti-state's rights, anti-Constitution, pro-free trade, etc., then you
you (sic) should make other
arrangements.

The bias here is obviously extremely explicit, and reaches from the
title of the site itself to the category headings ("junk science"). It is
clearly intended to appeal only to the sympathetic reader, rather than in
winning new adherents through reasonable argumentation – in other words, it is a
classic Internet "echo chamber" that reinforces pre-determined belief
systems.    

So, to summarize: the Freedom Advocates website is inexpert (it is only supported by [and links to] like-minded independent citizen activists
with no discernable training or expertise in urban planning); dated
(there are few if any recent documents or links to external news items); irresponsible
(authorship and contact information is rarely, if ever, indicated); and unverifiable
(most of the content is comprised of – and refers to – a narrow
range of opinion nested in powerfully ideological code words, rather than a
common pool of data and analysis from which contrary opinions might be
constructed).

The gulf between the world views on display through these two websites is
disturbingly apparent: one is diverse, empirical and inclusive, while the other
is paranoid, monolithic and exclusive, premised as it is on an extremely narrow
and quasi-religious definition of "freedom". One need not be "biased" towards smart growth to recognize,
through the application of information literacy principles, that anti-planning conspiracy theories are fuelled by belief rather than evidence, rhetoric rather
than reason, and are, above all, singularly ideological.