Plagiarism in plan

[baseballfanman]

Greetings Cyburbia Community,
In my spare time I like to remix pop and dance music. Indeed I've always wanted to be a famous DJ, but as of yet, that dream has not come true. But I was thinking about music, specifically the type of stuff you find in the pop and dance genre, and if you don't already know, much of that music is taken or "sampled" from an older track (most likely a disco track from the 1970's). A phrase found within the music community reads, "good artists copy, great artists steal." What I was thinking about is if there are various parts of a plan (any type of plan, comprehensive, transportation, etc..) that planners "sample" from other plans. I've come across many plans that tend to have similar goals for their community (protect open space, promote transportation connectivity, increased community safety, and so on), and I wanted to see to what extent planners "plagiarize" other plans. Or, if it's something that is shunned as being unoriginal and unimaginative. I hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season and a very Happy New Year!

[mike gurnee]

All the time. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel, and many places have similar goals. But each document is tweaked for individual community needs and desires. How to attain those goals differs from place to place.

[JNA]

All the time. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel, and many places have similar goals. But each document is tweaked for individual community needs and desires. How to attain those goals differs from place to place.

Agreed. Another difference is the priorities, and in the strenght/style of the language.

[Howl]

When consultants do studies for municipalities the municipality often specifically asks for a "best practices" section so they can see what other communities are doing.

[baseballfanman]

Has anyone found examples of a verbatim copy of a text?

[Suburb Repairman]

There is a firm in Texas that, out of professional courtesy, I will not name that has actually copied sections verbatum from other plans and forgotten to change the name of the city.

[ColoGI]

There is a firm in Texas that, out of professional courtesy, I will not name that has actually copied sections verbat[i]m from other plans and forgotten to change the name of the city.

I've seen that from a large national firm as well. IME that's how private firms make money (slight exaggeration for effect).

Anyway, its not as if planning comes up with something new every three weeks or so. Quick: name the next five headline topics on Planetizen.

[Hink]

I am an aspiring dj. DJ Streetscape in the house...


It happens all the time. There are only so many ways to reinvent the wheel. If someone has found a good way to do it, the idea gets used. The ideas (and most the time plans) are not copyrighted, so there is really very little comparison to music.

[Cardinal]

Has anyone found examples of a verbatim copy of a text?

Yes.

As a consultant I keep an eye on my competition. I have seen some pretty horrible examples. Often it is "in-house" copying. Examples:
- An economic development consultant from Texas who is well known, but if you read his taget studies, you sonn note that two-thirds of the report is identical from study to study, and there is nothing new in his methodology, even when the particular circumastance of the client community suggest there should be.
- A very well known palnning consultant in Wisconsin who recycles the same images and text in far too many plans. Is a new urban style development pattern appropriate everywhere without modification of any sort?
- Once I co-authored a plan with an RPC. In putting together the background section, they simply used search and replace, and stuck in new data tables. The problem is that they used the language from a neighboring village (Black Earth) which shared a name with a river running through both communities. In our version, "Black Earth Creek" was referred to as "Mazomanie Creek".

Most consultants hesitate to copy too liberally from others. If you mention goals, for instance, two factors may come into play. The first is that, from place to place, the same visioning processes tend to produce the same kinds of results. People more or less want the same things - parks, quality neighborhoods, low taxes, etc. Besides this, there can be pressure from the local planners or even the planning consultant to adopt their preferred vision of things. The second factor is that we often try to fit local goals within the context of a larger region. Usually a county or regional plan has similar goals, so we will try to word them not to conflict. At times that may mean adopting them verbatim. Perhaps this is even a form of plaigerism to encourage.

I have seen consultants copy large pieces of text from other sources and dump them into studies or plans for their clients. (This tends to get me hot, knowing how much they are being paid, knowing I would NEVER do that, and knowing that their "reputation" is what got them the job instead of me - if only people knew. " One of the worst I have seen came from a very well known New Jersey-based economic development consulting firm. When it came to providing descriptions of the industries, instead of doing original research and providing insightful analysis, they copied the BEA industry desciption, word for word, with no additional information. This happens too with market analysis, where the entire report is merely the $100 data purchased from ESRI. One company even goes to the length of describing the methodology "they" used, except it is ESRI's methodology that they are cutting and pasting into the report as if they did the analysis themselves. (And I have mentioned my opinion of the quality of purchased data several times before.)

Yup, it ticks me off because I know I do exceptional, original work. I would love to get those contracts, and I hate to see the client communities get taken.

[mendelman]

...because I know I do exceptional, original work.

[Big City NU Planning Firm principal]No....I know I do exceptional, original work...so I should always get the contract.[/Big City NU Planning Firm principal]


Just joshing....

[Cardinal]

[Big City NU Planning Firm principal]No....I know I do exceptional, original work...so I should always get the contract.[/Big City NU Planning Firm principal]


Just joshing....

Yeah, they tend to be opinionated as to the only acceptable urban form, but at least their ideas are original. I don't compete against these guys very often.

[Cismontane]

I don't see how one can "plagiarize" a plan. A specific plan is the outcome of the city's intentions and general plan or zoning resolution, the planners and urban designers of it's planning dept, the consultants' strategic advice, and an extensive public engagement process. By definition, it's open source.. and precedent work for future plans.. hopefully as a best practice, if you've done a good job. You should no more be able to plagiarize an enacted and published plan than you could plagiarize a legal opinion once a court has ruled on it and issued it.

Of course, it would be bad form to simply take somebody else's work ad verbatim and reuse it, but this happens all the time with the language of zoning ordinances, for obvious reasons (once language withstands legal tests, it's better to reuse it exactly in that same jurisdiction). Some people WANT you to take their stuff adverbatim, like the smartcoders and USGBC folk because they think it bolsters their brand.

Our competitive advantage as planning consultants rest in the tools and procedures and protocols we develop and use to do planning work, not in the final reports we issue. I'll never send you my proprietary software tools, or the spreadsheets showing certain types of calculation for the design and capacitizing of infrastructure or for the optimization of land-use decisions... or my detailed planning estimation parameters, for thatmatter. And I'll never put that stuff in a report either.. at least not in a form you could actually steal it.. What goes into a report to a client is the result of the analysis, not the proprietary technology and know-how that made the analysis and decisionmaking cheaper, quicker, more cost effective, more fiscally responsible, more functional, more effective, or whatever...

For example, one planning consultant proposed to have their entire staff physically clean up the database files behind a client city's 80,000 parcel database (from its property tax assessment office, and updated messily by dozens of different people over decades).. so as to provide a usable basemap for the city's comp plan update. This represents weeks of work for a team of 5.. easily $150,000 in work... with which they just gobbled up 30% of their total fee, doing purely administrative work. Another consultant - who actually got the appointment, simply analyzed the database and then created a python script to clean it up in one week, with a team of 2 or $12,000 in work. Clearly, the second consultant had a huge competitive advantage.. and will want to keep her script to herself (and pay her programmer very very well). The second consultant clearly should've had that much more time in doing the substantive work of developing creative land-use strategies and re-zoning proposals.. since she didn't have to spend all of her fee on fixing an SQL database... in order to even produce a land-use basemap using GIS.