Meet Sean Hertel
Urban planner, university instructor, and founder of Sean Hertel & Associates Urban Planning
Sean has a passion for planning – and its potential – that he expresses with so much creativity, I had to interview him. We first met shortly after he launched his consultancy, when I was still working in government, and I’ve admired how he’s built his practice over the years. On top of working on major planning projects across the Toronto region, he shares his expertise with student planners as an instructor at Waterloo, York, and Toronto Metropolitan universities.
Sean is always a blast to talk to – and even better, he really knows his stuff. Read on for his refreshing take on how planners communicate – and what we should be doing better.
Lisa: How do you think we’re doing with making planning engaging and understandable to a public audience?
Sean: Often, planning is storytelling, because planning is personal. The act of building and planning and engaging in city making and city building is inherently personal. Obviously, it's technical, too. There are densities and forecasts and capacities to think about. But really, if you look at, it's all about people, and a lot of times planners, I think, forget that.
And so, our primary function really is storytelling. Where are we now? Where are we going? Who are we? Who do we want to be? And why? And then, how do we get there? You can't meaningfully talk about how, unless you talk about where, why, and for whom. And we have to be in service of those larger stories, those larger things.
One way that planners alienate a lot of people is that we focus on the how, and then we jam in the what and the why and the whom later. But we have to be compelling because honestly, city building is compelling. The funny thing is, we go to museums in cities that we visit, to see their art, their antiquities, and that's great. But what we fail to see is that the city itself is more monumental – the city’s the museum, it’s the container for all of humanity's hopes, dreams, aspirations, epic accomplishments, and epic failures. It's the physical representation of who we are as people. And so that tells a story.
So, when planners are writing a recommendation report, or an information report, or a technical review, or a public meeting summary, or an introduction, we care about the cities that we're in, we are conveying and retelling the story. But we're totally missing the art in that. We have to move minds; if we don't capture people's imagination and care, we're done.
We do our ourselves a real disservice when we get into the how, when we get into the policies, procedures, requirements. Those are professional and technical things we have to get into. But we first have to tell a compelling story. I don't think that we give people enough credit for being able to understand why it is we do what we do. And I think, like anybody, you tell someone why you need to do something, like when parents tell a kid to do something, their first question back is “why?”
Everyone needs a compelling reason why, and it's so simple, so fundamental, and yet it's missing, we're missing the story, we're missing the big picture.
Lisa: So, how do you go about bringing your creativity, the storytelling, into your work?
Sean: Just do it, in the background. And also, as part of the consultation, formal and informal process, leading up to a report, whether it's a statutory public meeting, or workshop or whatever, or even if it's a staff meeting.
Try to curate different conversations, try to curate conversations that otherwise wouldn't be had. Talk about the history of an area, talk about the Indigenous storytelling in an area. Talk about something that you found really interesting, bring in a picture in people’s minds. Spatial planning is visual planning, it’s sensory planning, it’s a story. And yet, how often do our written reflections and written products actually honour that? Very rarely.
Lisa: When people hire you, they know what you’re all about, you’re very open. How do gauge how expressive you can be? How do you assess where and how to express your creativity, your insight, in your own voice?
Sean: When I talk about policy to anybody who will listen to me, I always say the Toronto Official Plan is a really weird document in that it starts with a sentence that ends in an exclamation mark. The very first sentence says, “Toronto is a great city!”. Exclamation mark! Holy shit! Not only is there never any sort of human sensory experience in official plans, but never, ever, is there an exclamation mark. I think it's great to put in an official plan because that sets the tone, right off. And, I love the courage.
Planners complain about how no one cares, no one reads our reports. Well, can you blame people? In my written documents, I like to use pictures. I like to use anecdotes in my course syllabi. And I've gotten in trouble many times, but I still do it anyway. I tend be a little cheeky, just to incorporate some personality, just to drop some neon-coloured breadcrumbs to get people engaged.
How I approach my writing is to read the room, and acknowledge what's around us and speak to it, to let it in. There are some people that write and you almost get the sense of resistance. Especially, reading certain reports, you just feel like you're getting pushed. I like to write to make people feel that I'm speaking to them, whether it's by adding a joke, or using different pronouns, or writing in a different tense, being inclusive, using images, pictures, on starting a sentence, maybe with a question, like “What does it mean to be sustainable? What does it mean to be equitable?” Ask a question, because it begins conversations.
I think we're really doing ourselves a disservice by making our reports read like mattress label tags that no one reads.
Lisa: How do you guide your students on writing reports that people actually read?
Sean: I say, start at the end, the idea lead, because we take for granted that people are going to read our entire report. Use talking headers, use different techniques to tell a compelling story and to tell it quickly, and early. And then you can build in the background after, but just tell them what they need to know. And ask them what you need to ask them. Just be very direct.
I say writing sparsely is one of the hardest things to do. A client the other day said they want a report in a week, they want it really short and concise, and I said, “I could do that if you give me more time.” Because it's harder to write more clearly, directly, and shorter. It takes time, because it takes a lot of thought. And you have to cut through all the shit.
Lisa: Planners have an ethical obligation to be clear, forthright, and transparent in their work. All of the professional associations have words around responsibility for communicating with clarity. And yet, our reports and plans are incredibly dense and difficult to navigate. What do you think about the planner’s role in providing clear communication?
Sean: There are a lot of ways that people dance around to hide and bury truths in their reports. They use a lot of “shoulds” and “coulds” and “potential” and that, to me, is just code. What are they trying to hide? I’ve done it so many times as municipal staffer myself because we're told that even though there may be other options, this is the way we go balancing our professional obligation to the public interest and our obligations to our employers. And the fact is that you’re making a salary, right, so you're trying to honour both.
I don't like writing like that. I like my writing to tell the truth. That's the main thing for professional integrity, because we make recommendations, not decisions, and that is probably the only piece of the thread of what we really think that will ever remain on the public record. Because, how often do planners’ recommendations get followed to the letter?
If you don't write that report with your heart and to the best of your ability, that might be the only thing left of your professional opinion. So that report has to honour your professional and ethical and moral responsibilities.
Lisa: Have you found other differences between writing as a public sector employee from preparing documents as a consultant?
Sean: I think I write the same. Because to me, regardless of what sector you're in, a planner is a planner. And you should not be artificially changed or influenced by the expectations put on you. And, no one sector has a monopoly on the public interest, right?
So ultimately, when you're writing a report, especially with recommendations, that's your client, the public interest. It doesn't matter if you're in a public role or a private role, in my view.
Secondly, and it was very powerful, after years in writing reports in the public sector, I vividly remember writing my very first memo to a client when I went out on my own 10 years ago. I finished it, and I literally turned over my shoulder, as if to say, alright, now you can review it! Because it still felt like I was writing a report for a municipality, so I’m thinking, “it's going to council in June, and it's due next Monday, and it has to get vetted by everyone.” So, you just get used to that and then you don't necessarily write the best quality in that environment. Because you're like, “What this word is will get talked about and analyzed for an hour, so I might as well just put in whatever and it doesn't matter. Just get it done.” And it's just so soul-sucking. It's terrible.
So, then I had this this moment of exhilaration when I realized there's no one behind me. It's just up to me, if I think it's good enough. I had this moment of elation. It was one of the most powerful feelings I've ever had in my professional life. And something so simple. Yeah, I think it's good enough.
Lisa: Most of us have that experience, of something being cycled through the process for so long that there’s no joy left in the writing, it’s hard to feel a sense of ownership over the final version. What do you think needs to change?
Sean: I think the public sector can learn from the private sector that there is a point of diminishing returns. Edits come back, and you're, like, did I write this? Is this what I wrote? I don't even recognize it. It goes to finance, it goes to legal, it goes to whatever line department. It's a planning report being modified by non-planners, and yet it gets associated with us.
Ethically, there's a responsibility to maintain authorship integrity. So, at some point, we need to say fuck off. Planners are just generally too nice. Passive, very apologetic. No, stand up for what you believe in. We always say we have a public interest. So, we're the guardians. To me, that's a moral conundrum, when everyone edits it. And so, what's left?
Lisa: Thank you, Sean!
