The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows Things. About Cities. And how they work.

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows that cities run like little clockworks, and that if People Would Just Do As He Says, cities and every service, space, or interaction in them would be So Much Better;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room spends a lot of time on the internet sending dumb wimmins and Joel Kotkin emails and tweets that start that out with “Actually…Teh Facts Are…” that usually involve cherrypicked statistics he got from Another Smart Boy Urbanist;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows what bicyclists need, all bicyclists, everywhere, and what they need is Amsterdam. He knows what women bicyclists need, too, because Amsterdam;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room can give a two-hour long lecture on the GM Streetcar conspiracy;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room never doesn’t have to check his phone or tap on his computer when a woman is speaking at an urban gathering;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room is against manels, because those are wrong, but thinks nothing of taking 70 percent of the air time on the panel or talking over any women on that panel or in the room;

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The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room has read Jarret Walker, Ed Glaeser, James Howard Kunstler, and several pages of Jane Jacobs, and that’s what you need to know.

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows that the appropriation of the term “Street Fight” for Sadik-Kahn and Solomonow’s book was totes appropriate because the fight for bike lanes and urban playspaces has totes magotes been as hard as the fight for civil rights among black Americans and Chicanos;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room wants to reassure people that gentrification is merely a figment of people’s imaginations;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room wants people to understand that gentrification is not as serious a problem as Some People make it out to be;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room is white, but he really Gets It, you know?

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows that no matter what is happening with transit ridership, it is always going up, and anything that doesn’t show it going up is comparing apples to oranges or selecting the wrong frame of analysis or “Actually, the facts are…”;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room is inevitably affluent, but he’s worried, gravely concerned about poverty, and he knows that what he advocates for in the city will help with urban poverty, and if people who live in poverty fail to prioritize things in the right way, it’s because they don’t have the “big picture” the way he does;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room knows that too much democracy is bad for cities;

The Smartest Boy Urbanist in the Room needs to educate the rest of us.

[This article was originally published on LisaSchweitzer.com]