Interview: Allison Allbee

My homegirl, Allison Allbee, is a coworker of mine at ChangeLab Solutions. Born and raised in San Francisco, Allie graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in community studies and received concurrent master’s degrees in building science and city planning from UC Berkeley. She conducts research, develops tools, and works with communities around the greater San Francisco Bay Area and beyond to improve their health and well-being through city and regional planning policies. Besides planning, Allie is also a fellow shutterbug and has a great talent for making yummy food (which occasionally makes my tummy happy when she bequeaths us with office treats).

A few weeks ago, we grabbed some lunch and headed out to the Kaiser Center Roof Garden for a chat. This is what went down:

JUAN: My first sort of ridiculous question—and hopefully my only ridiculous question—is do urban planners play SimCity?

ALLIE: I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t.

JUAN: You’ve heard of it then?

ALLIE: I’ve heard of it. But I also don’t play video games, and so I don’t think people talk to me about them.

[Laughter]

ALLIE: I know there is a professor at Berkeley who has essentially created a SimCity for planners to help them make decisions.

JUAN: Here comes Godzilla…

Godzilla comes to town, SimCity 2013

ALLIE: I‘ve never played SimCity, but modeling cities is a really helpful tool. One of my favorite modeling tools is in Havana, Cuba. They have a little building that has a scale model of Havana. Any time a new building is proposed they go down there and put it in the model and they can have a community forum about the proposal. It’s nicely designed. So, whether modeling happens in virtual or physical reality, I think it’s a good thing.

[More laughter] 

JUAN: I personally have never played it but I wanted to play it for many, many years. For whatever reason, I just never did.

Okay, the first question I thought that I have to ask you, because I’ve always been curious, is: what drew you to city planning?

ALLIE: I was working in childrens’ programs for fifteen years. I thought schools could be empowering places. I worked in a lot of great programs and schools. Most educational systems are wack and disempowering, but I had the fortune to work with excellent educators who were changing those patterns. But eventually, I came to believe their work was hampered by the way the city was set up.

There was daily stuff that would happen to kids on the way to school. They would get beat up, or hustled. And then once they got to school, the building had a lot of problems. We were on the edge of a park so there were rats that would run through the building. They would run through the lights. The kids talked about the building a lot. The building became emblematic of how little society cared for them.

And then there was life-altering trauma. Like one night where I was driving a group of boys home. We went by some police activity and as we went by, one of the boys gets a call that his cousin had been shot. We were driving past his cousin. Three students were killed in the five years I worked in the high school, two within two weeks of one another. I felt like schools can’t fulfill their educational mandates because what was going on in the surrounding neighborhoods. In a place as rich as San Francisco, we should have the best school system in the nation. Every kid in San Francisco public schools should be able to say “I got a world-class education”. But they don’t and it’s because our public resources aren’t equitably distributed. I just felt like there has to be a way to organize our resources in a way that is more equitable. City planning is one of the major tools to do that in a systemic way.

JUAN: So was it sort of like in your head a decision where you thought like, maybe I can have a more positive impact on these youth through—

ALLIE: Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure it was that clear. I just thought I had more to contribute as a planner than a teacher.

JUAN: Judging from your photography and the photo diary you sent me a while back, it occurred to me that you seem interested in documenting life, and the reality around us. I’m curious if there have been other ways that you have attempted to capture your life experience.

ALLIE: I love many different kinds of artistic mediums. Photography is a major one for me. I love photography because it forces me to do something that my insecure self, wouldn’t do. The camera sort of emboldens me.

JUAN: How so?

ALLIE: To get an interesting picture, you have to go out into the world. You can get interesting pictures in your house, for sure. But, if you’re interested in how things work and how people interact, then you have to get out. I’m a nester! I’m a cancer! Home is where I want to be, but photography makes me leave my nest. And it also makes me wait for action to happen. Weird and wonderful things happen when you wait.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 2015.
Photo by Allison Allbee

ALLIE: It makes me more sensitive to what is going on in a situation and more observant of how people are reacting and acting in a situation. It makes me climb so that I can get a more interesting shot. It makes me go out in boats. It really gives me license to explore.

But, I love exploring life through many mediums. I grew up doing circus stuff. I dance consistently for twenty-five years. I draw. I write. So yeah, I’ll go after any artistic medium to help me understand the world. Knitting, quilting, whatever.

JUAN: When you walk or ride through a city, do you imagine how it could be improved, like if you had a magic wand?

ALLIE: Oh yeah. All the time! I think that that’s one of the things I’m so grateful about my design education. It was all about thinking about the seemingly impossible. Don’t worry about gravity. Don’t worry about a budget. Don’t worry about material, just what is the thing that you want to see? Then work backwards from that idea. Designing the built environment is one kind of design but it’s more interesting to me to think about how to work our way out of degrading social constructions. Like racism and sexism—how can we design our way out of those problems?

JUAN: I feel like there are some skills there where you’re learning how to look, how to observe—

ALLIE: Yes, the other thing I learned is to not worry about what comes out of my hand or mind at first. Just let things come out and then use technical skills to edit. That creative process is very liberating for me. Just letting things come out, and then refine them. 

Culture Clash, Ocean Beach, 2014. Photo by Allison Allbee

JUAN: I can completely relate with that.

I think this is the first question I thought of, and something I’ve been thinking about for myself, but when you were a kid, what were some of the vocations that you were interested in?

ALLIE: This is an interesting question. So, I definitely wanted to be a supermodel. I was a skinny little white girl in 1988. Magazine covers were pasted with skinny white girls like Cindy Crawford, and Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell, but mostly white girls and they were reflecting my physical appearance. I loved fashion. I still love fashion, so I was really drawn to that world. I thought it was glamorous and fabulous. I wanted two jobs. I wanted to be a supermodel half of the time, and archaeologist the other half of the time. And then I realized that the fashion industry was full of shit and slaughters people’s self-esteem and self-worth. I didn’t want anything to do with that. But I did really like photography, fantasy and creativity. So I’ll held onto those pieces and left all the other junk behind.

JUAN: What book or books do you wish everyone would read?

ALLIE: I’ve thought about this a lot recently. Zami by Audre Lorde is one of them. I don’t know…

JUAN: It’s a tough question, I know. If someone asked me that I’d be like, aaaahhh!

ALLIE: She is a beautiful writer. Everyone should read A People’s History of the United States. This morning I was looking at this book called Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi. That is also a well-written book. White Teeth by Zadie Smith is another one that has stuck with me.

JUAN: That’s on my list of books to read this year.

ALLIE: Yeah. Oh, I loved that book. I’m also a really big fan of children’s books. I love a book called The Red Tree by Shaun Tam. It’s sort of melancholy, and I love a children’s book that is melancholy. And If You’re Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow. It has lines like, “If you lose the keys to the house throw away the house.” Those kind of sayings stick in my head when I am in a crappy situation. They’re protection.

JUAN: And that’s what a good book should be.

ALLIE: Yeah. Things you can carry inside yourself. I think all those books have given me things to carry inside of myself.

JUAN: Okay, my last question is: dead or alive, who would you be interested in meeting?

ALLIE: I would like to hang out with my mother’s father. He was in my life, but he lived across the country so I didn’t see him a lot. He shaped my life by shaping my mother’s life, but I don’t understand him very well. I would love to spend an afternoon with him if he was willing to give me the time.