War between transportation, community development planners enters its fifth day

Loud shouting, flying acronyms and rampant gesticulation marked the fifth day of internecine clashes between transportation and community development planners, sources tell Saturbia. Although there we no reports of injuries, feelings were hurt on both sides, and a transportation demand model was shattered during a heated battle early yesterday morning.

Fighting began late Wednesday after a community development planner accused his transport colleagues of being the “white people of planning”. “They control the vast majority of the money, have huge numbers of students, and seem to grow more popular by the day,” stated the disgruntled CD’er. “If we had that kind of money, think of the community meetings we could hold.”

A spokesperson for transport was unabashed in his rebuttal. “You try getting anywhere without transport. Transportation is pretty much everything. BRT rules!” He went on to state that transportation planners do not have nearly as bad of style as is commonly believed. “Many of us are very snazzy dressers, despite the number of engineers in our ranks. In fact, we give them special training in proper style once they decide to work with us.”

Both sides have been fighting for the hearts and minds of the economic development and environmental planners, who despite their name have little control over either the money or the planet. The housing community has been split, with those interested in TOD siding with transport, while the shared-equity/inclusionary zoning/land trusters seem to be leaning towards their CD comrades. Some outside commentators say that the diverted attention of the housing planners on Thursday allowed Toll Brothers to cover the entire state of Rhode Island with faux-colonial McMansions. The land use planners just keep making nice GIS maps with lots of pretty colors, while the urban designers were unavailable for comment due to an emergency planter and bollard shortage in Kazakhstan.

In an attempt to gain a critical toehold on contested territory, the CD’ers occupied the computer lab, even though most do not know how to use them. Sounds of kumbaya could be heard coming from the lab overnight, and police who retook the lab in the morning report that the computers had all been turned into easels for the mountains of flip chart paper that now littered the floor.

An urban theorist, interviewed between cigarettes while standing outside the main building, surmised that “it was really quite pathetic how neither group could recognize the overarching grid of neo-liberal discipline enshrining both sides in a web of postcolonial strategies, and what they took to be tactics of liberation were really manifestations of the (re)productive capacity of postcapitalist space. Honestly, the problem is epistemological and ontological - they are both fucked.”

There was some hope of reconciliation yesterday, when both sides came to an agreement that Randall O’Toole was a jackass. A group of collaborative planners attempted to put together a mediation plan late Saturday, but plans were called off after a spate of violence. Witnesses report that one of their group attempted to step in between the warring parties to inform them that their problem was that they each lacked a BATNA, and was summarily beaten by both sides.