22 February 2010

How did I get here?

How Did I Get Here?
Professor Marc Schlossberg, Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, Town and Regional Planning

I think of myself as a Californian. Not like a surfer dude, but just a guy with a sort of west coast attitude. People from the west coast USA are more relaxed, out-doorsy, easy going and friendly. I was born in Philadelphia on the East Coast of the USA, but from age eight to sixteen, my formative years, I lived in LA. After that we moved to Texas. It was like growing up in three totally different countries.

Our schooling system is totally different to yours. Schooling just kind of is. For us, our whole schooling at primary and secondary level has nothing to do with University life and careers. Here, at 13 or 14, you are deciding what A-levels you are going to take and what career you’re going to do. For us it’s not like that at all. In fact our first two years at University are just general education classes and you don’t have to decide on a major until your third and fourth year. My undergraduate degree was in Marketing and was just a random default choice. My father had worked for 25 years at IBM. He would come home and talk about Marketing, I understood it a little bit so I thought, “Why not?”. But it wasn’t chosen as a career path. You had to choose something and I chose that.

I was really into music back then and became a college radio DJ. It was around the time that grunge was coming out so I was really into the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Nirvana, anything that was loud and would annoy my parents. The radio station at college was very open to us playing anything we wanted. Schooling for me was never that important. I did well, I guess you wouldn’t become a professor if you didn’t. My undergraduate degree wasn’t driven by anything academic and it wasn’t until I finished it that I got any political awareness at all.

My career had nothing to do with my up-bringing and everything to do with a random temp-job I got in my twenties. In the final summer before I finished my degree I got a very random job through a temporary employment agency with a non-governmental organisation that did environmental education work. I had no idea there was a career path where people got paid for working in organisations that did good in the world. That one job changed my whole trajectory. I continued to work for organisations that were changing the world for a little while but soon realised there was no career ladder so thought I should maybe go back to school and get a masters degree.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I got hold of prospectus and went through it from A to Z, and at U there was something called urban planning. I had no idea what it was, I’d never thought of it, I’d never heard it. So I asked my then fiancée “What do you think this one is?” She said, “Well I don’t know, but it sounds like a field where you imagine how the world should be and then figure out how to get there.” And I thought, “That sounds about where I am.” So I went for it, got it and that launched me into the world of urban planning.

Between my Masters and PhD I went and served two years with the Peace Corps. I went to Fiji which was fun because it was a former British Colony. I got to see this whole craziness between former colonised area, developing country and island mentality. I recommend to all my students to take time off between academic experiences. Those times are a huge benefit. You need to pay rent, transport yourself from where you work to where you live, pay taxes, live in the world and see how it works to see how to change it.

I got a letter in the mail today from a United States Senator. It was to congratulate me, on becoming a Fulbright Scholar, which was kind of fun. It’s a pretty big, pretty prestigious, programme. There are five of us here this year I think, at the professor level. What I wanted to do was come somewhere where I could study and think about community design, urban form and sustainable transportation. I thought I could go a lot of places to do that but I needed to consider my family. In the end I chose Sheffield because of its size, its history and its energy and vitality and here I am.

X-Factor was my family’s starting point at integrating into local culture. I even brought X-Factor into teaching last fall, it worked really well with a lecture I was giving into public participation. Since coming here we’ve been doing a lot of travelling as a family. The kids are eating it up and are learning so much. We’ve been to York, Bath, Stratford upon Avon and London a couple of times. We had New Years Eve in Edinburgh, it was great with the fireworks over the castle.

The last four months have been spent living here and absorbing how things work around me. One of my primary interests is the relationship between designing cities and how they work for pedestrians. What I’ve noticed is that in Sheffield, people driving have no tolerance for walkers which is very different from the west coast of the USA. It makes me nervous that kids walk to school on variable pavements beside roads filled with fast moving cars. The crossings at different roads aren’t necessarily set up to protect walkers or give signals that make them feel welcome. Still, the walking rates here are phenomenal. Where I am from we have a much better infrastructure designed to encourage kids to walk, but far fewer kids do it. I want to know why that is.

Life has taught me not to get in my own way. We tend to want to be always busy and force things to happen. We get very uptight when things don’t appear to be working out the way that we want. I’ve learned that if you put yourself in the right position and set things in motion the right way they tend to work themselves out on their own if you give them the time and space to do that. I try to do that both personally and professionally and not get too stressed out about life.

Back home I play ultimate Frisbee. There’s a club here at the University. It’s a fairly basic, quick, fun game. You don’t get the angry testosterone of some other sports, it’s much more calm than that. It’s a cross between basketball and football with set plays like in American football but played with a Frisbee. There’s a lot of running around and you have to be pretty fit. But here in the UK it’s all about travelling around and experiencing as much as possible but also spending as much time as possible with the kids. They’re still getting used to things here.