Does "Garbage Language" Infect How We Talk About Cities?

One of the better essays I read last month was a Vulture.com piece by Molly Young titled, "Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?"

Young is referring to an infamous and often-lampooned sort of corporate-speak: Can we circle back next week when we've got the bandwidth for a deep dive into some of these mission-critical key learnings? What makes it "garbage" is that these idiosyncratic phrases fail to communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plainer English. Their function is often to obscure meaning, not illuminate it. But that doesn't mean “garbage language” is used for the same reasons by everyone who uses it. Young writes:

When [a middle-manager at a previous job] spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect.

Sometimes, garbage language is a display of power. Sometimes it's a shibboleth, a form of in-group signaling. Sometimes it's a way of pre-empting and shutting down objections to something that, if described in plain terms, would be clearly objectionable. (Young cites a fantastic example of a rage-inducingly euphemistic letter informing a group of employees that they will be prohibited from taking any paid time off—for their own good and professional development, naturally.)

Young's piece got me thinking about the garbage language used habitually by the people engaged in city building—from planners, to developers and real-estate salespeople, to academics, to elected officials, to citizen advocates. A lot of it is embedded in our unconscious habits of speech and writing; I definitely catch myself using words that fail to foster clear, honest communication. Here are four observations about garbage language in city-building.

1. Garbage language is a cheap form of signaling.

If I had to take my best stab at parodying the currently in-vogue form of planner-ese, it'd go something like this:

The multimodal corridor plan will be developed through an inclusive, multi-stakeholder collaborative process which centers the values of equity and sustainability, resulting in an organic, community-led vision for a more vibrant and livable Main Street corridor.

Obviously that's turned up to 11. But you don't have to look hard to find examples of the overuse of vague aspirational buzzwords like "equitable," "sustainable," "inclusive" or "collaborative" divorced from any concrete way of measuring or defining them.

The function of this language is to check off a box on a checklist labeled "Best Intentions." Pretty much without exception, the planners I know and those I went to school with genuinely want to do their work in a way that helps redress past and present injustice (equitable). They genuinely want to work on projects that will retain their value over time and not saddle the next generation with liabilities (sustainable). They genuinely want to help create places that delight people (vibrant) and improve their day-to-day experiences (livable). None of the intentions are either phony or phoned-in.

The problem is that using the language is easy. Doing the work is hard. And constantly using the language can seduce even the most conscientious of us into believing we've done the work when we haven't. That's why if you have to tell me too many times how inclusive your process was, I begin to suspect you doth protest too much.

What happens when you start with the question, "What would our cities look like if we designed the whole enterprise of planning around addressing the immediate needs and struggles of those who live in them?" I suspect we'd end up in a very different place than the final destination of so many planning processes that have equitable stamped all over them.

2. Garbage language papers over actual, meaningful disagreement.

The ubiquitous word livable (and yes, I've been guilty of using it) is a good candidate for the garbage heap. People like it because it's vague and meaningless, and it allows you to pretend to agree with all sorts of people you actually don't agree with. A search for “livable city” very quickly turns up references to Copenhagen and its world-famous compact neighborhoods and bicycle-friendly streets, which would surely prompt eyerolls among the members of Livable California, a group formed to oppose measures that would allow increased residential density in that state. One suspects the Livable California crowd would also fail to see eye-to-eye with the folks at AARP’s Livable Communities initiative, who have championed such senior-friendly housing innovations as backyard accessory dwellings.

The point of using livable is to stake a claim to moral authority, not to convince anyone or communicate anything. “I’m for livability; you’re whatever kind of monster would be opposed to that.”

Who's against a vibrant place? Do you want to live somewhere that's dull?

Sprawl seems like a useful word to capture a whole host of negative consequences of suburbanization, but its usefulness falls apart upon examination. Los Angeles sprawl is nothing like Atlanta sprawl is nothing like Mexico City sprawl. What is it you’re opposed to, and more importantly, what is it you’re for? And can you communicate that in precise ways instead of taking cheap shots at a word that few would ever use in a positive sense?

Smart makes me twitch involuntarily, especially nowadays with its newfound association with techno-gimmickry. It's not only meaningless because it's impossible to argue with—Who wants a dumb city? Who favors dumb growth?—it's actively harmful in the way it shuts down discussion of whether the things "smart city" boosters favor are actually all that smart at all.

3. Garbage language is not the same as jargon—but jargon is sometimes bad too.

There is a lot of jargon in city planning, engineering, and architecture. The difference between professional jargon and garbage language is that the former consists of words that have specific, technical meanings. Planners talk about floor area ratios, street sections, easements and variances. Architects have massing and articulation and cladding. The words themselves aren't the problem, but that doesn't automatically excuse the use of them in a context where they end up obscuring rather than enhancing understanding. Planners, like all trained professionals, need to get better at avoiding insider jargon when dealing with the public, or explaining it clearly when they do use it. Why talk about a "facility" when you mean the street?

My guess is that usually the use of this jargon is just a matter of habit, but there are times it seems to serve a different function: to create an air of authority that shouts, "I'm a highly trained expert, and you're not." (And a preemptive excuse for dismissing a dissenting opinion that isn't couched in the same jargon. It’s this tendency that our Conversation With An Engineer video, whose viral spread a decade ago was many members’ first exposure to Strong Towns, is lampooning.)

There are times when there is probably some near-term practical value to the planner/engineer/developer in sending exactly that message. But in the long run, I believe it's corrosive to the need to elevate the conversation throughout a community and turn active, interested citizens into people who can comment in an informed, specific, and productive way about questions of design and placemaking.

4. The hardest thing of all is to develop new language to capture new understandings.

Josh Cohen at NextCity asked a few years ago, "What Planning Jargon Do You Want to See Disappear?" Among Cohen's bugaboos: Smart Cities, Livability, Smart Growth, Road Diet, Cycletrack, Cyclist and Pedestrian, Shared Mobility…

And, notably, stroad, a word coined by Strong Towns, of which Cohen has this to say:

Stroad is a portmanteau of street and road that refers to wide, fast, highway-like city streets that prioritize driving speed over all else. Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns coined the intentionally ugly term to describe a problematic piece of infrastructure that didn’t have its own name. The term is fine among traffic engineers who know the functional difference between road and street. But stroad is popping up more broadly in the sector, and for most everyone else in the world, roads and streets are synonymous and a portmanteau of them means nothing.

Strong Towns member Michael Lewyn defended stroad in a follow-up piece at Planetizen:

But he also criticizes terms merely because they are not widely known…. I agree that most Americans don't know what a stroad is—but every non-obscure term was once obscure. The genius of the word "stroad" is that it conveys a one-word mental picture of something that would otherwise require a sentence to describe—a street where cars travel so rapidly as to endanger pedestrians, but which is not a limited-access highway (which means that street lights ensure constant stop-and-go traffic, thus making both pedestrians and drivers unhappy.) I wish every American knew what a stroad was, and I am happy to help lead readers in this direction! 

This is the difficulty in simply saying, "Jargon is bad and plainspoken language is good." Sometimes a highly specific, less known term actually conveys a specific meaning better than any other word could. This does, however, result in a learning curve.

We struggle with this at Strong Towns because we are trying to convey a set of understandings about cities that should be widespread, but aren't. For example, our articles and podcasts frequently make reference to "productive places." And it's gotten us into trouble—even more so when we say "financially productive." To some readers who lack context, it's inscrutable why we would be so worried about the financial productivity of a place—are we writing for money-grubbing developers or investors? Do we just want local governments to squeeze as much tax revenue out of private landowners as possible? (Hint: no.)

This is something we work at: developing a language for the understandings that are central to the Strong Towns philosophy, without expecting every new reader to take a crash course in that philosophy.

If you have thoughts about which language used here at Strong Towns helps communicate our message, and which language becomes an impediment to communicating that message (and why), I'd sincerely love to hear them. Comment on this article or email me at daniel@strongtowns.org.

Top image via Unsplash.

---