Mimes Over Matter

About: Sentimental Planning is a hope for an a inquiry into the planning process, communication, and the very fabric of social values. During my senior year of college at the University of Washington, I was tasked as part of my graduation requirements to create a senior project. Sentimental Planning is a result of that endeavor. As a student in an urban planning college, I was struck by just how little energy was devoted to feeling, passion, and imagination in the planning and design process. After countless conversations, classes, and attempts at research it was clear to me that emotion was not respected, invited, or utilized openly in the planning process. I know academia, science, and rationality specifically work towards eliminating emotion, however, humans and not robots emotion are present with us at all time whether we are aware of them or not. My goal in creating Sentimental planning is to harness the human capacity of emotion, give it a place in the planning process, and expand the tools and capacities planners and designers have to create beauty, functionality, and healthy peaceful structures and communities. 

 

Mission: The introduction, development, and practical application of Sentimental Planning. A method of interacting and experiencing space so as to access our multidimensional capabilities so as to create and bring forth a new way of being. Facilitating the paradigm shift into compassionate love for all beings, where our built environments are nurturing and in alignment with the natural world.

Vision: Built environments created with the intention of promoting freedom leading to communities, cities, and societies which are organized to invoke creativity, unity, passion, and self-discovery.

Abstract: Karl Marx introduced the notion of alienation, a destructive and subjugating consequence of capitalism’s insatiable appetite for material consumption. Building from Marx’s claim that capitalism separates humans from their humanness, I argue that capitalist societies also exacerbate alienation through the physical and social construction, function, and intention of their cities. Cities, being centers of industry and culture, have been designed to maximize profit and maintain the imperialist agenda of subjection and unlimited growth. This paper develops an alternative theory from which to base city design, political action, and epistemology in general; an approach I call Sentimentalist Planning. Based on the ethical theory of David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre’s concepts of freedom, I argue that planners must meld emotional intelligence and rationality so as to expand the spectrum of their creative potential. Rather than embracing Marx’s solution of revolution through universalizing the means of production, I propose that the paradigm shift begin with the intention of universal love and is actualized though built cities (community) that encourage freedom. Presently we live in a society that has created a dogmatic worshiping of negative freedom, which I claim has been manipulated to serve the capitalist agenda.  The type of freedom I argue as a society we need to actively promote encompasses both positive and negative liberty as identified by Isaiah Berlin being agreeable with compatibilism. Contradictory to Berlin, however, I argue that these two concepts of liberty are compatible and in fact are inseparable. Using Sentimental Planning with the intention of encouraging freedom will not only open new ways to conceptualize urban design and the role of planning, it will also, invite new ways of being, communication, and insight which will allow human capacity to move past the shortfalls of instrumental rationality, advancing an epistemology that inspires others to investigate and achieve freedom as individual members of a collective society.