Catherine Brinkley distributed a handout that asked the patrons gathered at G Street WunderBar to sketch their ideal city.
“What I’d like you all to do is just take a few moments and think about a place that you really loved when you were a child,” said Brinkley, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at UC Davis. “Think about what features it had. Was there a playground structure? Maybe there was some green space, maybe there was a water feature, some places to hide, just think about what you liked.”
She asked the crowd to share their memories.
Green spaces with trees to read under, minimal noise pollution and an intricate playground made of wood were all listed by the crowd.
“The goal of this exercise was for everybody…to connect with the thing that they really liked as a child,” Brinkley said. “Typically, it’s nature, it’s the ability to run around without having to worry about cars, right? That park with a simple play structure.”
“When we take a moment and we think about planning for children, we tend to create places that work better for everybody,” she added. “This is the impetus behind Safe Routes to School, the Americans with Disabilities Acts, all those curb cuts, the Endangered Species Act, these are all deeply rooted planning concepts.”
Brinkley’s research focuses on planning for healthy communities. At the June Davis Science Café, an event hosted by Jared Shaw and the Department of Chemistry, she led a discussion on “Making a Utopia: The Science of Planning Your City.
The topic was incredibly relevant given that the City of Davis is currently updating its general plan for the first time in about 20 years. A general plan is a governmental document that outlines a city’s long-term economic, social and development goals.
“Everything I say is absolutely applicable to you right now,” said Brinkley, who also serves as vice chair of the City of Davis’ planning commission.
How Catherine Brinkley became interested in city planning
Brinkley became fascinated with city planning as a child. Growing up in a military family, she lived on military bases and moved almost every two years.
“If anyone’s ever been to a military base, you know they’re kind of cookie cutter,” she said. “They look the same whether you’re in Michigan or Germany or Texas. It doesn’t really matter, but the moment you step out into civilian space, it’s so very different and interesting.”
The differences in how cities divided land into specific zones and the rationales underlying those decisions fascinated Brinkley. When she moved to California almost 10 years ago to become a professor of human ecology at UC Davis, she was surprised that there was no single database for all the general plans in the state.
“If I wanted to know how to recommend playground designs or bike paths, I had to go to each municipal library, find their plan, and them compare them, which made it really, really difficult to have any sort of informed planning,” Brinkley said.
Inside California’s general plan database
To rectify this problem, Brinkley and her colleagues created the California General Plan Database Mapping Tool, a search engine that allows the public to sift through California’s 482 city general plans and 58 county general plans.
“These are blueprints for how California is going to develop for the next 20, 30, 40 years and you can search across them for any term you care about no matter what it is,” Brinkley said. “It’s a great way to think about who’s got good, strong policies, and how you might take some of those visions that you have, see who else is realizing them and then make recommendations to your local jurisdiction.”
The tool has allowed Brinkley and her colleagues to better understand how California cities and counties are planning for policies that promote social and environmental justice. Brinkley shared that only 67 of the 482 cities in the state currently have language in their general plans that addresses racism.
Progress can always be made to grow that number, and Brinkley shared an example of this possibility. In 2018, California implemented SB-1000, a planning and zoning law that requires that California cities address “environmental justice” in their general plans.
“From 2019 to 2026, we’ve seen an increase in the number of jurisdictions that are updating their plans to address environmental justice,” Brinkley said. “We went from 93 cities to 288 in a seven-year span.”
How residents can participate in the Davis general plan
Brinkley urged the public in attendance at the Davis Science Café to get involved in the city’s general plan process, to make known their values, what they’d like to see in the community and to encourage the rest of the populace to get involved.
“If you want to provide public comment or write an email, I’m one of your planning commissioners in addition to being a professor at UC Davis,” she said. “You’ll have a friendly face there and maybe in 10 to 15 years, we’ll get to live the reality of it.”
One nuance about Davis that Brinkley mentioned is that about 50% of the population is under the age of 24.
“It’s because we’re a college town, but our college students aren’t really well represented on our decision-making bodies,” she said.
Since 2016, Brinkley has taught a UC Davis class that asks undergraduate students to redraft the City of Davis’ general plan.
“We’ve got almost 10 years of students redrafting the general plan with what they want to see,” she said. “They’ve got some interesting ideas about downtown, about economic development and connecting the green belt. Things that we all know would be really nice to have but haven’t put the words or policies to yet.”
Brinkley said that the students will present their ideas to the city’s planning commission on June 24.
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