I love signs. In another life I worked in advertising and I’ve retained my appreciation for short-form persuasion. Signs are also one of the easiest ways to get a sense of local flavor. A sign about fines for dog poop, or reminding children not to play on scaffolding, are pretty good indicators that those activities are going on in the area even if you can’t see them happening at that moment. I pay particular attention to signs produced by governments, housing associations, or other people/things that govern cities. Also, signs —especially ones telling you not to do stuff— are one of the city’s greatest source of unintentional comedy.
Recently I’ve been captivated by different London Councils’ reminders to pick up after your dog. Here is one from Fulham. I encourage you to actually read the whole thing.
This is a patently ridiculous sign. I’ve found that the English have a higher tolerance for word-count than Americans. It literally takes them twice as many words to say EXIT. They say “See it, say it, sorted” instead of “see something, say something.” But this is too far. Almost any guide on mass-communication will tell you to speak and write free of jargon, and in as few words as possible. “Fouling of footways” and “person in charge of a dog” are long winded ways of saying “pooping” and “owner” respectively. Second, the hierarchy of design is all wrong. The eye is immediately drawn to the penalty (in bolded large type), rather than what the sign is trying to do which is not have your dog poop here. Its like if someone threatened to beat you up before telling you what for.
Here is another sign from a different part of the same borough with better hierarchy:
Better. “NO DOG FOULING” is big, all caps, and has a nice red band around it. The call-to-action comes quickly in the notice — “PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG,” and it even ends on a nice appeal to civic spirit. But the lingo is still too complicated. Maybe this is a Hammersmith & Fulham issue...
Popping across the Thames to check on South London’s dogshit signage we get this beauty by Stockwell.
Finally a little graphic flourish. The dog and poop are lost a bit in the color scheme, but I appreciate the effort to catch the eye with some visuals. Words are much easier to tune out than pictures, and maybe Lambeth, with its large ESL populations, wants a more visual and less verbose approach. Here is a final example.
The hierarchy here is right. It tells you what to do and what will happen to you if you don’t. Simple. Does it look like the dog and its poop are from two different clip-art libraries? A little bit, but the point gets across.
I’ll pause here to say thank you for reading this far into a post about dog excrement. I actually have a larger point to make! The point is that most governments are bad at persuasive communication! Controlling dog poop is a relatively straight-forward communications problem, how do you imagine these people do at explaining housing laws? Or zoning? There is an amazing non-profit called CUP whose entire mission is to de-mystify and communicate complex city processes and issues. (They made this incredibly smart toolkit to explain zoning).
But there is a deeper problem when it comes specifically to the plan-making function of government: Most governments don’t think to persuade in the first place. I don’t mean they don’t do public engagement, or hold hearings, or run social media accounts. I mean that persuasive communication itself is rarely thought of as part of the planning toolkit. Let me explain.
Say you’re in a city where water is scarce and you want to make a plan to reduce consumption. You can institute a policy incentivizing conversion to water-efficient appliances, you could raise the price of water, you could ban golf courses, you could design a system of rain-catchers and grey-water treatment centers. But the simplest way is probably to persuade people to use less of the stuff — turn the tap off when you brush, shower together, ditch the lawn, etc. Plans are made up of actions that inspire outcomes, and rarely do I hear of persuasion as a defined action within a plan (do you have examples? Send them to me!).
Right now New York City is in a never-ending struggle with its trash. Experts have told us that the population of rats is pretty much directly correlated with the amount of trash accessible to them, so the Department of Sanitation is undergoing an overdue trash-containerization effort. In the early 2000’s we set up marine-transfer stations to ship trash out of state on barges. New York recently rolled out an expanded compost program to divert our organic waste away from landfills. These are all, great and necessary steps but…I have heard almost nothing from the City that tries to persuade New Yorkers to simply make less trash, and at the end of the day the root of the problem is we make so much of the stuff (14 million tons a year, but less less per capita than people who live in suburbs I should note).
In the 1980’s the city ran a huge anti-litter campaign, the centerpiece (literally) of which was 20 foot tall trashcan in the middle of Times Square that would be filled with real trash from the area. It was a slightly goofy, but I think, simple and effective way to demonstrate the scope of the problem. Where are the similar efforts for today’s issues?
Cities are run by politicians who ostensibly persuaded large swaths of people to vote for them, but agencies are largely staffed by bureaucrats. Having sat through some of their presentations… many bureaucrats can barely persuade each other, let alone the public. But actually I think the issue is more that persuasion doesn’t seem “real.” It is way easier for a politician or agency-head to point to something built, or a law passed and say they did something than a communications effort.
When planners ignore communication they diminish their effectiveness. Planning writer Charles Hoch once wrote that the ability to make plans relies on two main sources of authority:
Legal authority: Do this or you’ll get in trouble.
The authority of expertise: Listen to us, we’re smart.
But sitting above these two is “the authority of belief”
“Plans are more likely to be successfully implemented when they are based on shared beliefs — especially beliefs acquired through efforts to build consensus.”
So many issues facing cities today from homelessness to climate change will require sacrifice on the parts of everyday people. We have to convince people to give up their gas stoves for electric ones, to give up their cars for transit, to allow affordable housing to be built on their blocks. We need people to believe that these are in service of a consensus good, and its hard to do that with a 200 page document or bad PSAs.
So what would a planning apparatus with persuasive communication in its toolbox look like?
It would raise the legibility of city-shaping processes by explaining in plain language and in mass media what was happening in a city and why.
It would be a force-multiplier in any plan that required public engagement and participation.
It would view communications as a credible and viable means to change human behavior — the basic assumption of all marketing — and use that to shift citizen behavior in the public interest.
It would train planners to be adept communicators, and to think of plans not just as technically effective, but as arguments to win over an audience.
I’ll end with a very good example of persuasive communication. This is a sign made by a literal child that the Lambeth Council thought was good enough to be a posted on a playground. The hierarchy is perfect. If government can’t persuade you they can at least recognize people who can.
PLEASE READ THIS PART: I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to last week’s post, thank you all. If you liked what you read, the most helpful thing you could do in the early days of this substack is click share button and let others know!